Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn)

Author: Wendy Cannella

Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/2161

This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries.

Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2011

Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.

Boston College

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Department of English

FIREPLACES:

THE UNMAKING OF THE AMERICAN MALE DOMESTIC POET

(FROST, STEVENS, WILLIAMS, AND STEPHEN DUNN)

A Dissertation

by

WENDY CANNELLA

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2011 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! "!!#$%&'()*+!,&!-./01!23//.443! 5677! Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn) ABSTRACT Wendy Cannella Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Paul Mariani

The fireplace has long stood at the center of the American home, that hearth which requires work and duty and which offers warmth and transformation in return. Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic

Poet takes a look at three major twentieth-century men whose poetry manifests anxieties about staying home to “keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby’s chariot turning,” as Wallace Stevens described it (L 246), during a time of great literary change when their peers were widely expatriating to Europe. Fireplaces considers contemporary poet Stephen

Dunn as an inheritor of this mottled Modernist lineage of male lyric domesticity in the Northeastern United States, a tradition rattled by the terrorist events of

September 11, 2001 after which Dunn leaves his wife and family home to remarry, thus razing the longstanding domestic frame of his poems. Ultimately

Fireplaces leaves us with a question for twenty-first century verse—can a male poet still write about home? Or has the local domestic voice been supplanted at last by a placeless strain of lyric. Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn) Wendy Cannella

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I: Radiant Gist: The American Fireplace ...... 1

Part II: Keeping the Fire-Place Burning:...... 16 The American Male Domestic Poet

Chapter 1) The Inhabitable Ghost Houses of Robert Frost...... 28

Chapter 2) Locating the Palm at the End of the Mind:...... 65 A Contradiction of Place in Wallace Stevens

Chapter 3) The Door Opens: William Carlos Williams...... 133 and the Modern American Home

Chapter 4) Dismantling the House: Stephen Dunn...... 171 and The Destruction of the American Home

Epilogue ...... 268

! i! Acknowledgments

A vast thank you to the wonderful faculty and staff at Boston College who provided me for many years with a home away from home. The faculty and colleagues who have inspired my work are numerous and among others include—my teaching mentors Amy Boesky, Mary Crane, and Laura Tanner, who illustrated for me what thoughtful pedagogy can do for literature; my dear friends Alison Van Vort and Matthew Heitzman who remind me always of the importance of good, intimate conversation; Chris Wilson for his dogged guidance of any scholar in need, including myself on many occasions; Paula Mathieu for nurturing my earliest teaching efforts; Robert Stanton for his caring directorship. I wish to acknowledge, too, my many wise students who reminded me that the American lyric is a communal, not a didactic, creature.

With enduring thankfulness to Stephen Dunn, who laughed at my first poems only when they were meant to be funny, and who taught me life and poetry are not too far apart.

To my family a great debt of thanks for their indefatigable support, who saw to my education from its most literal infancy, and who inspired in me a life-long love of art and domesticity: Dewey, Michaelyn, Yvonne, Jesse, Sarah, and Taneil. And to my mother- and father-in-law for all of their help during the completion of this dissertation: Patricia and Stanley.

In particular to this project, I am indebted to a great many librarians for their kind assistance: especially those at the Milne Special Collections & Archives at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and at the York Public Library in Maine for sharing a haven of quiet study.

Fireplaces came to fruition mainly due to the tireless work of my committee for whom I am eternally thankful—the wise and generous mentorship of my committee chair Dr. Paul Mariani, the supportive encouragement and great sense of Dr. Suzanne Matson, and the unswerving editorial eye of Dr. Robert Kern.

To my husband Brian Matthews goes my greatest gratitude, for his willingness to “keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby’s chariot turning” (Wallace Stevens) while I worked. And to my two lovely daughters, Dewey and Hollis, who tried their hardest to distract me every step of the way—thank you, for reminding me where poetry comes from, and how life demands that, for our best moments, we put down our books.

! ii! Introduction: Part I

RADIANT GIST: THE AMERICAN FIREPLACE

THE RADIANT FIREPLACE

Perhaps American male poets have always aggrandized the powers of the common fireplace, revealing, as they do, old preoccupations with the gods. By the time William Carlos Williams wrote “Burning the Christmas Greens,” the

Fireside Poets had made vital the American hearth, and Emerson had already exalted the fireplace’s real and abstracted radiance, its double function as a source of heat and a social gathering place where housemates sat “Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of Storm." John Greenleaf

Whittier reinforced such radiance in his classic New England idyll

“Snowbound,” a poem Vendler called “the quintessential poem of domesticity” in American literature (Part 99). But there are two epigraphs to “Snowbound,” and before Whittier evokes Emerson, he first reminds us of an ancient fireplace tended by fifteenth century occult philosopher Cornelius Agrippa, a fireplace in which the forces of good and evil wage war inside our very living space:

As the Spirit of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the Divine light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as the Celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our fire of Wood doth the same. Cor. Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, Book I, Ch. V.

Fireplaces bear out an old dichotomy of light and dark. Their powers are linked to a cosmic power, Agrippa believes, capable of repelling dark spirits. As a source of light and heat—and in American history, means a thing of sheer survival—the fireplace takes little nudging to burst into the symbolic realm,

1 enlarging readily and almost literally to bear notions of transformation and divine protection. Through such enlargement, Whittier and Emerson’s beloved homesteads and their protective hearths fulfill Gaston Bachelard’s definition of the house as “an instrument with which to confront the cosmos.” “Come what may,” the French philosopher believed, “the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world” (46-47). Whittier speaks of just such an omnipotent force in “Snow-bound”:

What matter how the night behaved? What matter how the north-wind raved? Blow high, blow low, not all its snow Could quench our hearth-fire’s ruddy glow. (19)

The hearth provides a safe distance from the outside world and its ravings, both natural and criminal. Whittier’s glorification of the nineteenth century “hearth-fire” struck a chord with Americans in the wake of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, quickly selling 20,000 copies upon publication. Nor has the poem, largely unknown by the American public today, been wholly forgotten in the Northeast region of the United States where the house to which the poem is dedicated still stands in Haverhill, Massachusetts (“To the Memory of the Household It Describes This Poem is Dedicated by the Author,” Whittier had inscribed his poem, a work recently performed in Portland, Maine as a one- act play (‘Snowbound’).

LAMPS UNLIGHTED AND FIRE GONE GRAY

Like Whittier, Robert Frost will come to handle the home as a site of struggle between light and dark. For Frost, however, the darkness often wins,

2 conquered only potentially by the poetic imagination. In “House Fear,” the second section of “The Hill Wife” in Mountain Interval, the fire dies and the house, consumed by darkness, fills with “whatever might chance to be,” a twentieth century version of Agrippa’s “dark spirits”:

Always—I tell you this they learned— Always at night when they returned To the lonely house from far away To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray, They learned to rattle the lock and key To give whatever might chance to be Warning and time to be off in flight: And preferring the out- to the in-door night, They learned to leave the house-door wide Until they had lit the lamp inside. (123)

In Frost’s handling of the superstitious “hill wife,” the human imagination grows severe, only relieved by the lighting of the lamp which sends spirits scattering.

That these travelers prefer “the out- to the in-door night” makes particular this fear, which is not of the dark alone—the relatively natural darkness of the outdoor skies, say—but of the constructed dark space manifested within an unlighted house. A house’s architecture, built for habitation, grows haunted in abandonment.

The human imagination steps forward in Frost, wary as ever, for those devils in hiding. “I tell you this they learned,” the woman narrator whispers with a gothic chill recalling the eyes peering out of forty firkins in “Directive.” And while Frost’s prosody bears the mark of his Early American ancestors (certainly

“Snowbound”’s “What matter how the night behaved?” could well have been his own), the twentieth Century poet pivots away from Whittier’s form of American domesticity which praised so strongly the safe haven. And in “House Fear,” the

3 unlit home threatens to take on strange inhabitants of the dark—unsafe in its shadows, permeable to the outside world. Even when the lamp is lit, the house remains threatened by an impending darkness from within.

“No domesticity is entirely safe,” Helen Vendler has reminded us. From the gray fire to the haunted house, it is extinction which presents the greatest threat to domesticity, and American history bears this out too. It is human disappearance, death itself, which “intrudes,” as Vendler says, “on the domestic circle.” One poem which conducts such a test of the house’s “powers of accommodation” (Part 100) is Williams’ disturbing piece, “The Dead Baby.”

“Sweep under the table and the bed,” begins a horrible rhyme embedded in the domestic space, “the baby is dead.” Once the house is swept clean, “under the feet of the curious / holiday seekers,” these visitors hover to see the “white model of our lives / a curiosity—/surrounded by fresh flowers” (Vol. I 268).

“Domesticity is frail,” Vendler insists, “and it is shaken by the final strangeness of death” (Part 101). A dead infant decorated by flowers reveals the frailty of any domestic space, no matter how desperately one would like to preserve it.

The fireplace as a form of resistance against the frailty wrought by death is a central motif for Frost, who bore most acutely of each of the poets I will consider here, age-old anxieties of atrophy and decay reinforced by the cruel losses he suffered, and thus worked especially hard to prove to himself, and his readers, that the poetic imagination might be a regenerative force, capable of restoring to the act of decomposition the transformative energy of living—as he does in poems like “Ghost House,” “The Wood-Pile,” and “Directive.”

4 Frost relies on the many intimations of mortality evoked by the hearth- fire. The two men who come looking for work, hungrily watching the speaker chop wood in “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” may as well be grim reapers. At the threat of relinquishing his playful work to them, splitting “the unimportant wood,” the speaker holds the activity the more dear: “You’d think I never had felt before / The weight of an ax-head poised aloft, / The grip on earth of outspread feet” (252). Likewise, the wood of “Wood-Pile,” abandoned “far from a useful fireplace” reveals the exhausted energies of the “handiwork” and

“labor” on which someone had “spent himself.” Without the purposeful activity of providing heat in the fireplace, the wood still enacts a transformation: “To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay” (100-101). That cut wood brings, then, as contemporary poet Stephen

Dunn will have it, “Continual proof / you’ve been alive” (Insistence 18).

AT NIGHT, BY THE FIRE

While Frost examines the power struggles between the wood-burning poetic imagination and the log-splitting body, it is Wallace Stevens’ “Domination of Black,” which offers one of our greatest fireside meditations on mortality.

There, “At night, by the fire” the colors of the world turn and repeat themselves, the outdoors comes in, darkly, and the deepest dread of Frost’s “House Fear” takes the shape of a few mysterious images. “The cry of the peacocks” and “the colors of their tails,” traces of the gothic and inhuman, “swept over the room.”

But unlike Emerson and Whittier’s radiant fires, unlike even the temporary

5 protection of Frost’s hastily lit lamp, Stevens’ vertiginous hearth-fire absorbs, more than it deflects, the pressures of the dark. Hence black’s dominance.

Stevens’ fireplace becomes a center of lyric concentration where shadowy imaginings spin:

Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire.

Both what is there—the flames—and what is not—the tails of the peacocks as stand-ins for memories of elsewhere—burn together. The fiery imagination is incapable of separating the light from the dark, which explains in large part

Stevens’ tendency toward contradiction, for proffering one thing and subsequently annihilating it. In “Domination” the fire grows capacious, “loud,” the peacocks’ cries and the hemlocks’ colors darken the protected inner space of the home until the fire is fully consumed by the external pressures of the night world and the speaker’s memories of those shrill screams. He collapses into

Frost’s “House Fear” at last, despite the roaring fire: “I felt afraid” (7).

In his later work, Stevens attains a kind of Agrippa-esque triumph of light over dark, especially in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” “Light the first light of evening,” the speaker commands. “We say God and the imagination are one . . . / How high that highest candle lights the dark.” Ultimately a home materializes, a sufficiency of place: “Out of this same light, out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough” (444).

6 But the fear which marks “Domination of Black” is strewn throughout

Stevens’ early work, a symptom, I believe, of the poet’s devastating longing for a place to call home. My chapter on this topic takes up that life-long search for a connection to his house in Connecticut and its environs, and the way in which the poet often beheld both here and elsewhere in the same scene as he does in “The

Snow Man.” “Nothing himself,” a lost man, Stevens dreamt the romanticized past of his childhood home in Reading, or the fantasized elsewhere of the Florida

Keys—in other words, the “Nothing that is not there”—lurked within his present wintry locale in Hartford which was, for a great part of his life, “the nothing that is” (8). It is a doubling of vision embodied too by those “thin men of Haddam” who “imagine golden birds” despite the beseeching fact that their local reality is

“the blackbird” who “walks around the feet / of the women” of Connecticut

(“Thirteen Ways” CP 75). Again, Stevens is caught in the interplay of light and dark—black and golden, North and South, winter and summer—between a common reality and other longed-for skies.

A FIREPLACE IS FUNDAMENTAL

Much about Stevens’ desire has been noted. In 1984, Vendler made a cogent case for the longing which drove the man to impress upon Florida a female form. But Stevens was bewitched by place itself. And not only did the various comforts and discomforts of his northern and southern climes engross him; Stevens also cared about architecture. He cared, I am tempted to say, about interior design. He writes in great detail about his apartment spaces in his letters

7 to Elsie, and his daughter Holly tells of the way he redecorated his room depending on the season and its light. His efforts reflected “the seasonal idea,” a challenge the poet posed to himself in hopes of determining whether or not “the sublime was livable” (Vendler Part 21; 1).

Stevens even went so far as to write about home renovations. A little known article entitled “Making Good Use of the Attic: A Little Money Makes of

Abandoned Space A Room of Permanent Use and Delight” appeared in the early twentieth century journal Indoors and Out, which claimed to be a magazine

“devoted to art and nature” although it spends a good many articles discussing the best layout for a front porch or how to furnish a city apartment. In “Making

Good Use,” which is reminiscent of Stevens’ fastidious concern for the stage layout of his plays, the poet who all his life loved redecorating his room each season, sets out his own exacting preferences for renovating an attic space. Of the gable-end of the attic, the poet-designer recommends: “Use it for a fireplace, for a fireplace is fundamental” (46). In case the reader dares to understand

“fundamental” to mean “functional,” the poet goes on to sing of the fireplace’s ambient attributes:

The truth is that, of all the rooms in a house, the attic is the best suited for a fireplace. There are beams for the dancing flames to reflect on, and there are eaves that will sing pleasantly in winter nights and make a fireplace welcome, as it should be. (46-7)

How Stevens came to stand among the architects, designers, and construction specialists discussing the best building materials of the day testifies to the degree to which this poet, even as early as 1906, was thinking about living spaces. And while he might not offer any technical know-how for constructing the wainscots

8 that he demands must be placed around the fireplace to pronounce its centrality,

Stevens makes clear his poetic sensibility in this attic with its “beams for the dancing flames to reflect on,” and eaves that will “sing pleasantly” in the winter wind. While the historical American fireplace of Emerson and Whittier was a place of social gathering, Stevens wants one added to the most anti-social room in the house—the attic, a place he praises for its “friendly alienation” (46). Later,

Stevens would relax into less alienated reaches of his home, growing by stages into a native of Connecticut, and at last coming to realize: “His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not / In anything that he constructed,” but rather something “here. This was the setting and the time / Of year. Here in his house and in his room” (CP 443).

CINDERS IN WHICH SHINE

Where Frost and Stevens manifest their house fears—Stevens’ fire intertwined as it is by the dark elements of the outer world, Frost’s hope to light the lamp against the dark and drive away “whatever might chance to be”—

Williams pushed for a renewal of those old dichotomies. It was he who found most solidly that his house at “9 Ridge” proved to be, not a place where light and dark waged their historical war, but “an instrument,” as Bachelard said, “with which to confront the cosmos” (46). Williams, more than any American artist of the twentieth century, heralded the local. He did so at first defensively, hoping to validate his choice of residence in Rutherford, New Jersey, against Pound and his other expatriate artist friends, but Williams came to forget such rivalry and,

9 finally convinced by his own justifications, “fell in love” with the place where he resided (I Wanted 72).

As a doctor who made frequent house-calls, Williams was often out traveling in a “tumultuous / privacy of storm,” rather than cozied up by the fireplace. Through this strong connection with his townspeople, the hearth expanded to take on a community value for Williams. Emerson’s “Radiant fireplace” becomes Williams’ “Radiant Gist,” the glowing core that the poet finds scattered among the basements, alleys, ramshackle houses—the many hearths— of Paterson. In this vein, “Between Walls” reveals a fireplace of its own:

the back wings of the

hospital where nothing

will grow lie cinders

in which shine the broken

pieces of a green bottle (Vol. I 453)

The cinders tell of an unnamed fire, the green shards made iridescent by the light, transformed from trash into glimmering. Here, in the alley behind the hospital, the angelic whisper of its “back wings,” from infertile soil rises the kind of makeshift hearth only a man who seeks to inhabit his locale most fully can envisage. In a convergence of domestic commitment, “Between Walls” appears in 1938, around the same time the poet starts work on Paterson, his grand epic of locale.

10

FLUNG TO THE FIRE

Williams was the first American poet to fully transform the fireplace trope. In his hands it becomes not only a town-wide hearth, but the very emblem through which old motifs might be annihilated and redrawn as it appears in

“Burning the Christmas Greens” (Vol. II 62-65). There, the hearth is a place for participating in old rituals—the holiday greens draping the mantle—and for reevaluating those customs when all which once “seemed gentle and good / to us” was no longer relevant—the very cycle of dissent on which this country is founded. In “Burning,” Williams brings home, right into the living room, notions of cultural and spiritual renewal. The fireplace, in this poem, does away with symbols and returns the greens to an elemental world:

Their time past, pulled down cracked and flung to the fire —go up in a roar

All recognition lost, burnt clean clean in the flame, the green dispersed, a living red, flame red, red as blood wakes on the ash—

and ebbs to a steady burning the rekindled bed become a landscape of flame (62-63)

Old Christian symbols to the fire!—but an older symbol exists in the fire itself, Williams tells us, the fire which consumes all and leaves only ash. In burning the relics—the act of casting off, annihilating, cleaning house—there is revealed a living act, “a living red” by which our old reliance becomes clear,

11 “clean in the flame, the green / dispersed.” For Williams, the fireplace echoes

Paterson, a place of fire, a will to cleanse the old symbols yields a new place, “a landscape of flame.” Those greens were brought in only to fill a need against the bitter winter with its loss of light and warmth:

At the thick of the dark the moment of the cold’s deepest plunge we brought branches cut from the green trees

to fill our need, and over doorways, about paper Christmas bells covered with tinfoil and fastened by red ribbons

we stuck the green prongs in the windows hung woven wreaths and above pictures the living green. (63)

The season’s trimmings, so festive at their moment, have faded back to become, strange bric-a-brac. At the center of the home, above the fireplace, hovers the rather ridiculous miniature model of the world:

On the mantle we built a green forest and among those hemlock sprays put a herd of small white deer as if they

were walking there. All this! and it seemed gentle and good to us. Their time past, relief! The room bare. (63)

The great “as if” of those deer—their falseness suddenly clear. It is “the interpenetration of the domestic and the strange at their most inseparable”

(Vendler Part 97). Such relief in purging these outgrown symbols, of clearing the

12 home, opening the way to imagine it anew. Williams’ fireplace offers a meditation on annihilation which—unlike Frost who searches in “Directive” for that place which was “no playhouse but a house in earnest” (342)—tries to imagine a world in which the past could be erased to give way to the new.

But in trying to erase tradition, a more ancient cycle is revealed, annihilating the stale greens with their religious connotations of immortality, evergreen, facing instead

an infant landscape of shimmering ash and flame and we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire. (65)

The resonance of “infant landscape” invokes not a Pilgrim’s vision but a newborn promise which echoes the somersaulting fetus which closes Paterson

Book 4: “This is the blast / the eternal close / the spiral / the final somersault / the end” (202). A begin-again lurks within every ending, as Williams, a man who delivered babies, well understood. When the fireplace at 9 Ridge goes dark, the house is not filled with dreadful ghosts—not with Frost’s “Whatever might chance to be” nor Stevens’ peacock cries—but with the possibility of more human beings filling it, future ghosts.

The mantle held the Christmas greens, and beneath the mantle the roaring fire waits—a kind of proximate death which the domestic frame creaks to accommodate (Vendler Part 100)—to beget their transformation back to ash.

“Ash white,” Williams calls the infant landscape. But it is we who are

13 transformed through the act of fireside meditation, through the burning of old truths, as we stand now “refreshed among / the shining fauna of that fire.”

Fauna. That false parade of deer at last made triumphant. Fauna. No longer the

Flora of the Christmas Greens. Fauna. We animals of this given region. Fauna: the ancient Roman goddess, wife of Faunus and symbol of sexuality and renewal and regeneration, celebrated at the ancient winter festival of the Lupercalia, this ancient deity who reveals the future. Williams’ fireplace holds fictions, transformations, locality, and ancient myth. Here is where the past and future meet.

Perhaps Williams’ fire stands not so far from the great radiance of

Emerson and Whittier’s, in his American vein of pioneering optimism. One thing is certain: the fireplace, so central to homes in the Northeast in the early twentieth century, grew less vital due to changing heating practices. Now I press a button to set the thermostat. In fact, I program it to set itself. Back in 1869, the

Currier & Ives world portrayed in Whittier’s “Snow-bound” was already fading as a portrait of life, and by the time contemporary poet Stephen Dunn inherits this history of poetic fathers who stoked those early fires, the fireplace has become an ambient distraction, with a heat that draws far fewer Americans than the uncanny warmth of the television set. It has come down to a recreational choice now, Dunn reminds us: “Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm, / some said. Oh for scotch and a sitcom, said others” (Local Visitations 19). Logs and scotch. Or Stevens’s smoker of big cigars before the fireplace. The American

14 male poet will not give over trying to imprint his homey hearth with his own masculinity.

15 Introduction: Part II

KEEPING THE FIREPLACE BURNING:

THE AMERICAN MALE DOMESTIC POET

“Modernist tough guys,” these male domestic poets have been called—

Frost, Stevens, and Williams too in his way, all men who tried in the early twentieth century to relocate the lyric from “the far empyrean” to “bawdy earth,” whether that be the hill towns of New Hampshire or the suburbs of

Hartford and Paterson. As changing literary expectations emerge from an increasingly Modernist polemic, conceptions of manliness complicate these poets’ places in the world, their personal lives and their poetic. The American lyric poem at this time, one critic says, is esteemed only “when what is culturally branded (and denigrated) as essentially female is not done away with but is married to the male principle” (Lentricchia 191).

Frost, Stevens, and Williams understood this pressure, and felt that their poetry in kind must avoid traditional English frills and touches, must be ‘manly’ in a way that seeks to elevate what is foolish, soft, thoughtless—the reductively female. Stevens, for instance, worries over his ‘lady-like’ attention to composing verses; Frost applauds manly, not ‘sissy boy,’ poetry (184-191). The gendered split was based, of course, in only the roughest stereotypes, like French gendered words—‘foolishness’ (sottise) being female, and ‘work’ (travail) male. For these and for other new American poets, increasingly, notions of manliness became

16 tangled up with a preference for the non-literary and the speech-like, the real, everyday work of literature.

Likewise the domestic hearth of Emerson and Whittier was not wholly abandoned as overly feminine and sentimental, but refigured as a place where real work occurred, where real words were spoken in a room with a fireplace, the design of which might invite a complication of thought in masculine speech, a space fueled by the manly act of splitting logs. Spaces darkened by ghosts, as in

Frost’s “House Fear,” or darkened by language and mediation as in Stevens’

“Domination of Black,” or—it doesn’t get more manly than this—the great annihilating furnace of Williams’ “Burning the Christmas Greens.” This anxiety for the masculine stems in many ways from the fact that these were men who wanted to write poems in a culture that valued the railroad, the automobile, feats of engineering, things that go.1 So American poets began to make of their poems machines, sometimes written in the language of the local mechanic.

While Williams worked his demanding job as a local doctor, and Stevens walked his two miles to the Hartford Insurance Company five mornings a week, in many ways, the young Frost embodied the modern stay-at-home Dad.

Reading with his children, playing outdoors, family meals. Stevens too put a priority on his domestic life, writing defensively to Williams soon after the birth of his daughter: “But oh la-la: my job is not now with poets from Paris. It is to keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby’s chariot turning and that sort of thing” (Letters 246). “That sort of thing,” was the domestic life of the home, and Stevens used the figure of the hard-

17 working father to elevate the female household into a manly locomotion:

Burning, Churning, Turning.

Germaine Greer once said “The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.” And as the state of American poetry has always been split by a mixed male and female history—embodied at the very top of its family tree by

Whitman and Dickinson, neither falling neatly into gender divisions—it is difficult to untangle the manly Modernist lyric from those roles played out in the household. Even in recent times our way of handling gender has oscillated between feminism and manliness. Greer coincided with Anne Sexton’s

“Housewife” (77) and Sylvia Plath’s exclamation of “Viciousness in the kitchen!”

(30) in the 1960s and 70s.2 Not long after, Robert Bly and his “Poems for Men” demanded their respective place in the 1990s. Bly’s anthology, The Rag and Bone

Shop of the Heart, opens with Williams’ “Danse Russe”—recasting the lonely, ridiculous man as the happy genius of the household. Bly’s essays on American

Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (1990) also explore that gender-rooted dichotomy. In general, maleness seemed to come back into vogue in the 1990s. It was a decade still obsessed with the automobile, which saw the appearance of that masculine subject in another anthology: Drive They Said: Poems About

Americans and their Cars in which a poet named Robert Dana writes: “I drive on / toward the house I live in / that is not mine” (312)—the American male, he is intimating, should keep moving.

By contrast, the feminism of Sexton and Plath was overt and necessary in the continued wake of the 1950s when, as Adrienne Rich has said, “the family

18 was in its glory” (qtd in Michailidou 70). Their take on domesticity revealed everything buried by Modernist men: the repressed desires, as well as an oblivious and explicit grappling with cultural gender roles. Plath shows a resentfulness which is the inevitable cultural unraveling of Stevens’ fondness for domestic design: “I see your cute décor, / Close on you” she hisses, “like the fist of a baby / Or an anemone, that sea / Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac” (“Lesbos”

30). The domestic space suffocates and steals.

Plath, who took on “woman’s traditional conflict between family and career,” continued to astonish critics in 1977 with her images which so often reveal just how domestic roles can result in a kind of effacement of self (Dobbs

11). “I am afraid of getting married,” Plath said. “Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free” (qtd. in Dobbs 12). This she demanded, presciently, in 1949, at the tender age of 17.

Sexton, too, illustrated what we have continued to call the “confinements of home” (Michailidou 73). In “Housewife,” domesticity takes on a complicated bodily entanglement:

Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements. The walls are permanent and pink. See how she sits on her knees all day, faithfully washing herself down. Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah into their fleshy mothers. A woman is her mother. That's the main thing. (77)

19 In Sexton, we have come so far, in this house with “a mouth, a liver and bowel movements” a hundred years far, from Whittier’s charming invitation to “Sit with me by the homestead hearth, / And stretch the hands of memory forth / To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze! (“Snow-bound” 52). Sexton’s house is an entity both abject and human, not protective but itself subject to a kind of rape.

“A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing.” At last, this is both a hereditary and learned captivity. As such, Sexton has killed the idealized image of Coventry Patmore’s angel of the house, that glowing housewife of domesticity.3

The fluctuation of representations of the American hearth are bound up in culturally enforced gender roles. Economic forces are at work as well. The Great

Depression drove women into the workforce, whereas the weak economy in recent history has driven men home. The notion that each man or woman has a starting point—in the home or outside the home—is the trouble. For Frost, and other young male poets, ‘manliness’ merely expressed “the culturally excluded principle in a life given to poetry that made it difficult for the modern American male to enter the literary life with a clean conscience” (Lentricchia 191). In other words, real men don’t write poems.4

Along these lines, Paul Mariani once told his story of coming out . . . as a poet, to his father. The elder man’s displeasure, he said, was palpable. The typically unflappable father pulled his truck to the side of the road and asked his teenage son if it was true he was writing poetry. When the son admitted it was true, the father thought about it for a moment, then said. “Well, you’re still my

20 son,” then started the truck again as the two drove off to work. Likewise, while supportive, Frost’s mother and wife “[toiled] joylessly and without hope of respite in jobs of no glamour and to lifetime grooves of family obligation”

(Lentricchia 192), while Frost often took teaching jobs out of guilt. Gender roles became confused for the Frost family as the poet’s mother, now widowed, was forced to fill the void left by his father’s early death. The desire to care for his mother and wife, then, was part of Frost’s difficulty in ‘entering the literary life with a clean conscience.’ And as Stephen Dunn will come to understand, if you’re spending all that time in your room, at the end of the day you better come out with something—and better yet, something good (“Art & Refuge”).

Out of this heritage of “frustration and domestic enclosure” (Michailidou

68) manifested by his chosen fathers, Frost, Stevens, and Williams—a heritage made all the more pronounced by those wily feminist poets Plath and Sexton who so deeply distrust the male—enter Stephen Dunn. To assert only the woman’s conflict of work, art, and domesticity, he knows, as his predecessors did as well, is to deny the male poet his predicament. It is distressing, therefore, for us as for Dunn himself to recognize what Dunn finally makes of the domestic self. It is something akin, finally, to Kafka’s Hunger Artist, that master of deprivation, whose refuge is reduced to nothing more than a cage. Useful, perhaps, but in the end offering all the trappings and entrapments of a kennel or a cage.

In “Turning Yourself Into A Work of Art,” Dunn respects the efforts of such labor, understanding that a work of art—like a husband dreaming of

21 elsewhere, I might add—“always is in danger of wanting more / than it can give itself permission to have” (49). The poet knows “it’s hard, and should be, / to become a work of art.” “Maybe the trick,” he says, “is / to avert your gaze, look a little sideways / as an astronomer does.” These lines, appearing in the months leading up to the tenth anniversary of 9/11, continue to reflect on the collapse of the poet’s marriage, as well as the near collapse of his hard-earned domestic poetic, in the wake of that terrorist disruption of the American Northeast. The poet has come to recognize that such confusion of the personal and the public— the risks of the autobiographical lyric, finally opens up the artist to his real work,

“the long adventure / of saying what exactly it is”:

That’s how a faint star becomes visible— just a glimpse at first, then the long adventure of saying what exactly it is that shines behind so much of its own smoke and gas. (50)

And it is this real work of saying that results in the arrival, finally, of the

American male domestic poet. From the pioneering speech-poetic of Frost’s domestic dialogues, the domestic desires which Stevens makes convolute in his flashes of language, and Williams’ digging in to the local, his dedication to New

Jersey through both habitation and lexis—comes Dunn, the American male poet who has learned from his masters to toil for a commitment to place, to family, if not to relish then at least to decorate his domestic space. In 1980 Vendler wrote of this phenomenon that, because Dunn

is a solitary trying, against his nature, for domesticity, there is an attractive tension to his work, testified to by the grind of withdrawn reflective language against plot and incident. Poems written by men about the difficulties of domestic life have been fairly rare before this century. Dunn is adding honest poems to this

22 recent genre; and watching a genre evolve can have, for literary people, the interest that watching a new volcano has for geologists. (Music 444)

After a lifetime of working out the taut frame of just such a modern

American domestic lyric, Dunn, shaken by the events of 9/11, leaves his wife and botches his refined poetic. Without his domestic frame, he stumbles and stumbles badly. True, in the arms of his second wife, he has found another enclosure. But it has meant leaving his home of thirty plus years and moving into another space, another region. Helen Vendler is right when she says that domesticity “becomes a compulsion that we take with us even to the most unpromising locations” (Part 99). Dunn knows it too: there are no safe havens— for long.

23 Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon

Press, 1994. Rpt. of La Poetique de l’Espace. 1958.

Coles, Robert and Thomas Roma. House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD.

Brooklyn: Powerhouse, 2008.

Corey, Stephen. “To Our Readers.” Introduction from Acting Editor. Georgia

Review 55.2 (Summer 2001): 399.

Dobbs, Jeannine. “Viciousness in the Kitchen: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry.”

Modern Language Studies 7.2 (Autumn 1977).

Dunn, Stephen. “Art & Refuge.” The American Poetry Review 35.5 (Sep./Oct. 2006):

24-25.

---. The Insistence of Beauty. New York: Norton, 2004.

Drive They Said: Poems About Americans and their Cars. Ed. Kurt Brown. Pref.

Edward Hirsch. Indianapolis: Milkweed, 1994.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Snow Storm.” The Oxford Book of American Poetry.

David Lehman and John Brehm, Eds. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. 32.

Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. New York: Library of America,

1995.

Lentricchia, Frank. American Literature. “The Resentments of Robert Frost.”

Duke UP: Vol. 62, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 175-200.

Michailidou, Artemis. “Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton: The

Disruption of Domestic Bliss” Journal of American Studies 38.1 (Apr 2004): 67-

88.

24 Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper, 1966.

Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1981.

Showalter, Elaine. “Killing the Angel in the House: the Autonomy of Women’s

Writers.” Antioch Review 50.1/2 (Winter/Spring 1992).

“‘Snow-bound’ Comes to Portland Arts Center.” Maine Sunday Telegram.

December 5, 2010.

Stevens, Holly. “Bits of Remembered Time.” The Southern Review 7.3 (1971): 654.

Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry & Prose. New York: Library of America, 1997.

---. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley: U of California P,

1966.

---.. “Making Good Use of the Attic: A Little Money Makes of

Abandoned Space A Room of Permanent Use and Delight.” Indoors and Out: A

Monthly Magazine Devoted to Art and Nature 3.1 (July 1906): 46-47.

Vendler, Helen. “On Domestication, Domesticity, and the Otherworldly.” Part of

Nature, Part of Us. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

---. Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984.

Whittier, John Greenleaf. Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll. Boston: Ticknor and Fields,

1868.

Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I

1909-1939. Ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New

Directions, 1986.

---. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II 1939-1962. Ed.

Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1988.

25 ---. I Wanted To Write A Poem. 1958. New York: New Directions, 1978.

---. Paterson. 1946-58. New York: New Directions, 1995.

Young, Cathy. “The cult of 'manliness': a curmudgeon's defense of "manly men"

devolves quickly into self-parody.” Reason Magazine. July 2006. Web.

26 Notes

1 Robert Coles, in his recollections in House Calls, tells of Williams’ own love of speed, and his tendency to address directly, as “Mr. Wheel,” his ‘almighty’ steering wheel. 2 Sexton’s “Housewife” appeared in All My Pretty Ones in 1962, and Plath’s “Lesbos” in the collection of Ariel put together by Ted Hughes, which appeared in the United States in 1966, a few years after the poet’s suicide. 3 See Elaine Showalter “Killing the Angel in the House: the Autonomy of Women’s Writers” for more on the modern dismantling of this Victorian domestic ideal as it had been set out in Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House,” the narrative poem first published in 1854 and expanded up until 1862. 4 Regarding Harvey C. Mansfield’s book: Manliness (real men don’t use subtitles), columnist Cathy Young wrote, “It’s a tough job defending manliness in the age of irony. Interviewing Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard and the author of the new book Manliness (real men don't use subtitles), New York Post movie critic Kyle Smith observes, "People can hardly say the word 'manly' without cracking up." Mansfield ruefully agrees: "It's very easy to make fun of manly men."

27 THE INHABITABLE GHOST HOUSES OF ROBERT FROST

-Chapter 1-

Robert Frost is a myth. A self-made myth and a myth we have constructed. We know this. The Great New Englander, a poet carved out of cliff, the man of the mountain himself and likewise doomed to crumble. We complain that some critics ignore the fact that the man who emblematizes New Hampshire spent the majority of his early life outside of New Hampshire (Monteiro ix). We marvel at his widespread fame, envy his achievement of becoming that elusive thing William Matthews calls oxymoronic: a “famous poet,” all the while worrying that his poems offer little more than crude dictums for the masses.

Some call him “Modernist” and “terrifying” in hopes of elevating him from such a common fate. Thus those who wish to study the poems must clear out the critical flotsam that clots their surfaces, and must face the surprising fact that the most renowned poet in our country’s history is a literary underdog in the academies.

But how much of Frost’s fame, and that of his poems, have to do with an actual place in New England? “So you see it has been New Hampshire, New

Hampshire with me all the way,” the poet claims (Prose 128). Frost’s reciprocal attachment to this New England state with its rolling fields and towering pines informs his work in ways that are unreachable by the yardstick of Modernism, yet his reputation is often framed only in terms of his Modernist tendencies or resistances. Neither is Frost a faithful successor to the traditional New England

28 poetry that came before him—the idylls of Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier, for instance, and the two-dimensional American hearths they offered, may have fueled his lyrical ear, but satisfied neither his demands for the poetic imagination nor his expectations for poetic surprise.

From all of these oppositions, it is clear that this is a poet who stands at a transitional moment in American literary history. In prosody, too, Frost is a maverick, but only ironically: through his commitment to old-fashioned forms at a time when free verse was blooming. Working from this deliberate place apart,

Frost imagines for his poetry what he seeks in the world, “a poem you can repose in,” but soon, like contemporary poet Stephen Dunn, questions the claim of the safe haven:1 “Maybe you don’t ask to feel secure,”2 Frost wonders (213). The confession hides not in the daylight of a letter or his prose, Frost’s more public jestering, but in the often cryptic daydreams of the poet’s notebooks. It is this wish for a qualified repose that leads us finally to potentially protective places— such as the children’s playhouse in “Directive,” where the dreamer tries to drive away his insecurity with the final impossible demand to “drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” Or to the “Wood Pile’s” artistic ash where the wood, abandoned “far from a useful fireplace,” stands as proof of labor and life. And deep down to the cellar of “Ghost House” which still serves as home to wild raspberries and light. Even through an experience of Puritanical renewal when the barn burns, making a new space from which birds will alight in “The Need of

Being Versed In Country Things.”

29 The poet’s hesitant request—for a home, if without expectation of absolute comfort, reveals the angel and devil on Frost’s shoulders: a sense of rest always stirred by restlessness; home threatened by itinerancy; order disrupted by transformation. These competing urges create a charged space, one of energy and potential. Little is to be found in Frost to confirm the boyish confidence of “Into

His Own,” where the sonnet’s speaker, blinkered by his age, projects that the end of his imagined journey would find him “only more sure of all I thought was true.” Instead, these poems transform themselves in unexpected ways, like a

New Hampshire farm, seasonally, through life and death, and under the influence of the elements.

While Frost has worried literary critics with his poems’ popular accessibility, their easy repose, some have clung to the stylishly nihilistic hope that Lionel Trilling got it right when he perceived something ‘terrifying’ and

Modern, something essentially insecure, in the theretofore simplistic, rustic works of the gentleman farmer. In her painstaking analysis of the divide,

“Apologizing for Frost,” Priscilla Paton describes the longstanding tradition of defensive posturing in literary and academic circles when it comes to Frost, claiming that “those who lionize and canonize him do so with some insistence, writing as though against the grain” (72). In order to make the leap from high school classroom to ivory tower, the poet must be painted as a terrible force for whom the snowy pastoral performs as a mere glaze over the twentieth century’s wasted landscape.

30 To make him Modern, the brooks and waters of his rural New Hampshire must reflect “the wreckage of the pastoral ideal,” a self “repressed and buried” staring up from the murky depths, wrecking the whole (Lentricchia 60-1). There is, of course, terror built into Frost’s life story, and despair—the number of close family members who suffered or died of illness or suicide, including three of his children early in life, gives cause enough to detect the grave threat underlying the work. But when astute critics such as Frank Lentricchia depict the speakers of

Frost’s poems as “agonized to the core” (61), one forgets the function of the poem’s specific geography, which, for Frost, is to provide renewed meaning in one’s place in the world: New England’s role in America, he says, is “a stubborn clinging to meaning.” Like the site of a poem, this is a place with the power “to purify words until they meant again what they should mean” (757).

This relationship of place to poetry for Frost involves a set of conditions that are both restorative and revitalizing, “The Old Way to be New” he etches in his notebooks in 1935—a ‘making it new’ that lies beyond the clutter of cosmopolitan accrual in Modernist collage (N 405). Frost’s consideration of

Pound’s Cantos, for instance—of which Frost says “I can’t say I don’t like them”

(italics mine; see the Ethics of Ambiguity 153)—reveals the kind of hand-tied response which bespeaks the conflict between the poet’s offhanded remove from the Modernist epic and his professional proximity to the participants of that form.

The desire to place Frost in a camp has overcome readings of the poems, neglecting their transformative spaces and function of renewal, often with

31 bemusing results. One critic has read ancient Roman ritual rites into “Mending

Wall,” citing Frost’s classical training and attributing to the poem the use of cultural allusion that achieves a sort of latent Modernism3 (Monteiro 129).

Another critic, dismissing the poet’s insistence to the contrary (although whether the poet’s insistence either matters or, knowing Frost, is to believed, lies in question), assures us “Stopping by Woods On A Snowy Evening” culminates in the speaker’s dream of suicide (Meyers). Naturalists read him in a Thoreauvian mode. Biographers cast him either as “Benign sage” or “monstrous megalomaniac,” a division William Pritchard (v) disclaims having struck himself, accusing his publisher of drumming up the controversy by positioning Frost: A

Literary Life Reconsidered as a radical battle against Lawrance Thompson’s so- called biographical assassination of Frost’s character.

Through the controversy, one thing can be said for certain: Frost makes for good marketing. How the most widely read poet in American history lives the literary life of an underdog is a fascinating headline. Such a reversal illuminates American scholars’ fallacious wish for a “democratic” poetry, as

Paton suggests, but more broadly exposes the type of literary sensibility that was building up at the turn of the century. The general mood of expatriation and cosmopolitan urbanity, an artistic way-of-being promoted loudly by Ezra Pound, casts its shadow on Frost in that infamous review of North of Boston4 from which we still hear the vicious echo of the “stupid, hemmed-in life” Pound accuses the poems of presenting.

32 As with most either-or scenarios, Frost’s poems do not rest neatly in one extreme of the divide or the other. Rather, many of the poems develop tense experiences of both repose and insecurity as a method for exploring tenuous notions of place—namely the Modernist sentiment and general human neurosis that there is better than here—that are coming into fashion around the time of the

First World War. And while Frost has been accused of packaging up a picturesque New England landscape, the poems belie the wish for the familiarity of a stable local architecture, laboring as they do to live within a structure that atrophies and changes under the push of both intimate and remote, and often opposing, forces.

Frost’s balancing act lies in seeking out both rest and agitation, an unlikely artistic vision for his strictly agitated times. The thought of poetic repose in his contemporaries brings to mind the frightening stillness of Prufrock’s etherized patient, or more literally, the troubled asylum of Pound’s incarceration. Frost’s granddaughter, on the other hand, speaks of a man who “enjoyed domestic intimacy and the continuity of reassurance, essential to his art, that it provided him” (Francis Frost Family 4).

True repose in a real home with a fireplace, plowed fields, stonewalls, and stars—a rural life—that is a form of domesticity both artistically unfashionable and divinely ordinary at the turn of the twentieth century, and it has left Frost as the confusing giant of American poetry—apart from his artistic peers, one with the people, or is it vice-verse? Often his formal verse alone holds the dream of order as the poem’s houses vanish. Yet, while exploring the destroyed

33 architecture of his world—a house reduced to a cellar or a chimney, a path cut, a path overgrown, a children’s playhouse lost to time, each a destruction in its own way—in Frost’s landscape we discover not wastelands, but inhabited spaces, flowered, ghosted, filled with birds.

Spaces such as the one in “Ghost House,” written in 1906, offer more than a “visual and emotional portrait” of Frost’s years of “bucolic isolation” (Parini

90), not a house abandoned, but a house connected to the world through shifting needs and uses, a renewed meaning of repose. After “Into My Own” casts its impossible confidence to create what is not yet man in A Boy’s Will, this second poem of Frost’s first collection clears the path for the poet’s lifelong search for that unstable dream of poetic repose. For it is an unstable repose indeed within

“Ghost House,” where the home the poem offers is not quite there, a vanished architecture. It is easy to hear in this early poem (15) a literary problem—the poet obsolete before even embarking on his career:

I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart On that disused and forgotten road That has no dust-bath now for the toad.

A formalist wedded to the decaying structure of his ruins, absent from the modern world of free verse, this poet moves alone, in a deliberate verb he dwells; it is the house not the aching figure himself who has vanished. But to move past the prosodic doorframe which Frost so often proffers as a threshold, we must hear the haunting question that the oven bird will rephrase years later: what to make of a diminished thing? For we find the house existing in a state of mere spatial memory, a foundation surrounded by delineations of human effort now

34 overgrown. In fact the house has entirely disappeared “And left no trace but the cellar walls, / And a cellar in which the daylight falls, / And the purple- stemmed wild raspberries grow.” The inhabitant subsists, speaks, from this place that has been substantially transformed from its original state and purpose. Like the wood-pile in its forgotten form of burning—the fire of decay—or the burning barn of “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” returning its wood to its original purpose as a tree, a regained place for nests, this home, opened up to its shadows, grows and shifts in the sun.

The possibility that the cellar alone can constitute the house, that even reduced to its lowest self, the house offers a form of rest, its revised spatial parameters a continued dwelling place, brings to mind the architectural philosophy Gaston Bachelard will draw up later in the century: “The house, the cellar, the deep earth, achieve totality through depth. The house has become a natural being whose fate is bound to that of mountains and of the waters that plough the land” (23-4). The wood of the house, gone, rotten, razed, or burned.

And the cellar, now constituting Frost’s ghost house in its totality, reduced to pure depth, achieves that which Bachelard understands as a “house with cosmic roots,” one which “will appear to us as a stone plant growing out of the rock”

(22). In this way the cellar-house reveals an ultimate connection of architectural space to its environment, rather than the “death-dwelling” which Frank

Letricchia has named it—a lost place redeemed, he says, only through memory of its psychic wholeness (26-7). It is more like what John Ashbery has said about

35 vanished structures—“what remains is a sense of someone’s having built”

(ARTnews).

As a new kind of wholeness, understood as a place built upon the world, the cellar creates a living space in its own right, and from it the house continues to exist in new form—a kind of carrying on. In his notebooks Frost pens three haunting words: “The Lost Cellar.” He will work through many poems in order to define that space, and what might be discovered in the event the lost is found.

His obsession with the underside of the home creeps into his vision, in his notebooks, an observation of more transformation stirred from the depths:

“Damp from cellar aging the new metal door at Bryn Athyn” (184).

The cellar space is one where Frost recognizes not exactly the

“antihuman” and the “anticreative” (26-7) in the natural scene, as Lentricchia claims in building his Modern Poetics, but the potential always for mutual creation, the pushing back and forth between man and landscape. It is not surprising that Frost would fear in his notebooks that “too much property clogs the flow of life” (50).The farmer would feel this pull acutely, and yet the language of the poem seems to speak against the destructive farmer (the cut path is now ‘healed’), on nature’s side, establishing a logic that does appear

“antihuman” as Lentricchia claims. That is, until the formula is snagged up by the moss which, 'marring’ the names on the tombstones, harasses human effort.

Is there a subtler distinction to this newly branched place the poet offers us? Frost himself dreamt of a house that might contribute a kind of life to the world and to literature; in his notebooks, he sketched the idea: “The house as a

36 character in a play. Wild things. Fear of threshold” (229). The pathetic fallacy, working in this way, with a lack of reliability, reveals not just a predictable pull between man and nature, with either side winning along the way, but instead a renaming of the landscape that seeks to designate the conflicting forces as a continual source of renewal, all things jockeying for position over time. It is the survivor, then, who becomes the beneficiary of atrophy, inheriting the foundation alone and naming it home.

The “Ghost House,” through this hypothesis, becomes a specter of former structure in the newly envisioned living landscape. Not a redeeming memory as

Lentricchia would have it in the Modernist scene—some obsolete memory of home or a deteriorated remnant of the whole, but an architecture that has led to something else, a living transfiguration, a place for the raspberries to grow (the cellar holds the lively pun of berry against its deadly sound-rhyme bury). Is the speaker of “Ghost House” the someone of the wood-pile who “lived in turning to fresh tasks”? For only that someone alone, as the poem goes, “could so forget his handiwork on which / He spent himself.” In “Ghost House,” the cellar, like the clematis-wound cord of maple of “Wood-Pile,” moves beyond its upper architecture, its original purpose: hidden recesses at last revealed—it becomes the new whole.

Above all, the poem contains the house, as it is and as it isn’t, both vanished and peopled, gone and rebuilt. In it we see a glimpse of ourselves and our futures, names marred by moss. The figure who lives there tells his story

37 after the whippoorwill’s recited song brings on a realization of the house’s human silence:

The whippoorwill is coming to shout And hush and cluck and flutter about: I hear him begin far enough away Full many a time to say his say Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star. I know not who these mute folk are Who share the unlit place with me— Those stones out under the low-limbed tree Doubtless bear names the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad, Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,— With none among them that ever sings, And yet, in view of how many things, As sweet companions as might be had. (15-16)

In clanging iambs, the bird’s wild chattiness shakes the poem towards its tipping point. Once the whippoorwill arrives to ‘say it out’—Frost’s way of referring to reading poems aloud—the poem’s sudden and simple heart appears, sounding lyrical and still, arriving as it does on the heels of the whippoorwill’s escalating shouts: “It is under the small, dim summer star.” The poem’s first line to hold a full sentence at last affords a breath to the ghost house’s inhabitant.

The former lines with their breathless enjambments, always awaiting their anticipated future rhymes, gave no rest, no repose to be found in this poem’s house. Only once the poet-bird shouts its song can the inhabitant return to the soft confusion of the stresses of speech, not the perfect metric pattern, but the row of hard accents that bolster soft sounds to “ruffle the meter” as Frost puts it

(“Conversations” 854). The small, dim summer star—the sounds hum and soothe

38 against the hard crest of reality’s battering statement. Here we find that moment when “something rises,” something which is “neither the meter nor the rhythm; it’s a tune arising from the stress on those—same as your fingers on the strings, you know. The twang!” (857).

We hear the twang in the inhabitant’s renewed speech as a result of

Frost’s commitment to the possibilities of old forms in a time of free verse.

Through a devotion to structure (a place to repose), the inhabitant has clung to his vanished dwelling, and through a realization of form—a metrical adjustment after the whippoorwill retells the world in a homeless flight, a new recognition of one’s insecurity in the cosmic frame—grows capable of newly apprehending the house as he returns at last to pronominal reference, pointing out a geographical location both broad and precise: “It is under the small, dim, summer star.”

Suddenly able to see the house as it stands in relation to the sky—its shrinking verticality, its cellar depth—the inhabitant realizes the state of things. The poet- bird’s song brings a clarity to the mind of the house’s dweller: in absent architecture absent life is revealed.

By seeing the house as it stands, an invisible memory against the night sky, a part of nature now, the speaker’s mind gains a picture of reality: for when facing a house “that [integrates] the wind, [aspires] to the lightness of air, and

[bears] on the tree of their impossible growth a nest all ready to fly away,”

Bachelard claims that “a positive, realistic mind” will reject such an image (52).

Reality has heretofore presented few problems to the speaker of the poem, quietly revealed in the questioning adjective “strangely” when the inhabitant

39 named his “strangely aching heart” in a soft suggestion of self-awareness. At last the strangeness is divulged, the other inhabitants in this “unlit place” are “mute folk.”

While the realization comes as it does, troubled with pathos, in typical

Frost humor the poem lands on the kind of two-handed hammering the poet is known for. For this human silence holds a loss, but also, for those still possessing the power of voice, a cheap joke: a man and woman in their dead quietude finally becoming “as sweet companions as might be had.” But to claim Frost as a hardhearted joker, the kind of resistant force Langbaum claims, or covert believer to be discovered in a subtle phrasing as Pritchard suggests, is to forget the chilling referents in his notebooks, three words jotted on the page: “The Lost

Cellar.” The poem comes as an echo of something, a wish to take stock of something gone, to look. That looking requires more than a resistance of pathetic fallacy; it demands a reinvention of the rules of perspective. The manifold strain of voice we find in Frost—in “Ghost House” between ethereal speaker, chirping poet-bird, and underlying authorial persona—works to create a problem of place that is continually drafted and corrected, a problem in which a variety of forces find their pull.

Robert Frost’s ghost houses offer a liminal space in which art can be accommodated: the house used for another purpose, not mere shelter, but a box of wood giving off energy in transformation and decay. In this sense, New

England is not a place; rather it will become a handiwork carved and forgotten, like Frost’s wood-pile, or else remain a thing constantly shaped and bound by

40 living forces of domesticity, willfulness, and art. In fact, it is the acts of shaping and neglecting which bind these unlikely forces together for Frost: the labor of the ax, the winding clematis, the poet wielding his pen, the mower wielding his scythe. The now disused footpath in “Ghost House” is “healed,” rather than overgrown (15). The wood-pile, lost from its original purpose, still might “warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay”

(101). The ‘whispering scythe’ of “Mowing” asks its creation to enact its own deathly transformation: “left the hay to make,” (26).

Such acts of cleaving — in the sense that cleaving holds in its momentum simultaneously a splitting, a path, and a reaching back — allow Frost to recognize links between home and art that will elude the likes of Ezra Pound,

T.S. Eliot, and other cosmopolitan-minded Modernists. Of the time, William

Carlos Williams alone — with his devotion to his long-time home and medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey — offers an unlikely philosophical alignment with Frost, despite the seeming difference of place to which his poems contend in their congested, suburban climes. Take Frost’s In the Clearing, where the poet works to push past the same overgrown paths Williams would rather recolor for himself in In the American Grain. While Williams imagines the myth peopled by the real figures of his home in Rutherford and Paterson, Frost moves to put the past to rest, “He is no fugitive—escaped, escaping,” he writes in “Escapist—

Never,” that “No one has seen him stumble looking back. / His fear is not behind him but beside him.” Still, the speaker realizes that nostalgic obsession

41 can take new forms: “It is the future that creates his present. / All is an interminable chain of longing” (434).

Williams’ celebration of the exploratory spirit of Christopher Columbus contrasts deeply against Frost’s “America Is Hard to See” (430) where he chides that Columbus “wasn’t off a mere degree; / His reckoning was off a sea”—still, the two poets share a vision of their homeland as a place carved out by historical struggle, and one which they would call home. Frost learned from Mother Goose the same moral he learned from his own travels to England: the cat can travel to

London only to discover the self-same mouse running under the chair. In other words, the same pursuits are found as much at home as away.

“Locality gives art,” the poet would say (qtd in Parini 159). Williams, too, would come to insist a poet should work where he finds himself by “inheritance, chance, accident” (Collected Vol II 54), Rutherford for the doctor and New

Hampshire for the farmer. There Frost would come to claim his own work contains the very “terrain of the Derry landscape, the Derry farm” (qtd in Parini

73). In it he found a space where home and work could merge, where farm, as both noun and verb, both yields life and requires it, and where the mistakes of

American history and the reality of a New England farm would make adjacent the mundane and the mythic.

Still, the real work of maintaining a home—of bolstering it, and defending it against change and decay— becomes a haunting issue for Frost. As a domestic male poet, Frost feels responsible for to the necessary construction of home against the elements and the New Hampshire seasons, an enduring motion

42 within an atrophying structure—formal verse, the rotting wood that frames the home, the susceptible farm, the human form. His distance from Eliot and

Pound’s Modernism grows clear in Frost’s landscape where, as for Williams, there exists the broken germ of potential as “The Generations of Men” goes on:

“[…] The only house / Beyond where they were was a shattered seedpod.”

Not willing to concede a complete absence of a house, offering up a shattered seedpod, any germ in which someone, something, might repose. To recognize in Frost the seed of potential is to question the longstanding criticism that has begged to read Frost as a frightening Modernist, and to resist a reduction of a poem like “Ghost House” to simplistic nostalgia. As in “The

Generations of Men,” the cellar of “Ghost House” performs the role of a natural being—connected to the world even in its greater absence—in large part comprised by daylight and wild raspberries. The house’s connection to the world is a reciprocal effort between forces that both erect and erase:

O’er ruined fences the grapevines shield The woods come back to the mowing field; The orchard tree has grown one copse Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops; The footpath down to the well is healed.

Critics have often spoken of Frost’s disdain for pathetic fallacy, and here the poem bristles with a heavy-handed bow to nature; its protective “shielding” allows for growth and works to counteract the wounds humans inflict on the mowed and wounded world, the implied wounds from which the footpath, worn down by human heels, must heal. But the woodpecker, itself a part of nature, also inflicts harm, so the poem works to reveal a confluence of forces

43 acting in reciprocal torque. Such back and forth activity ultimately disturbs the hierarchical reversals implied in the adjectives that appear to privilege one natural form over another. The shifting complicity of man, bird, and vine requires a continual realignment by the reader.

A similar disorientation occurs elsewhere in Frost. Take “Mending Wall,” where the things that do not love a wall include the natural force of “the frozen- ground-swell” which spills out the boulders, the hunters who wreak havoc to seek out the hare, the elves whom the speaker playfully conjures, or even the trees—pine against apple, indigenous or cultivated—themselves a kind of wall where no wall is claimed to be needed. It is not just nature against order here, as the ground swell intimates, but also hunters indirectly against order; the imagination against order; and finally, in that delineating mess of trees: nature against nature against and for order. Again, a formulate which won’t formulate.

Frost loved for the poem to complicate cultural notions of common sense. These conflicting forces make for an unstable, constantly shifting landscape, revealing a conflict of perspective which does not privilege, necessarily, a human perspective. So how should the reader understand the overt tone of intensified empathy for the natural world? Robert Langbaum claims the poet mocks the emotional excess of pathetic fallacy. Pritchard keenly adjusts such mockery, however, allowing a flash of self-projection to appear in “The Need for Being

Versed In Country Things” where he points out that the “not to believe” of the poem’s final line “doesn’t cancel out the impulse to believe” (168).

44 I find something more complicated at work in the poet’s handling of perspective and diction in rendering his poetic spaces. Frost certainly inherits, and must choose how to handle, the philosophical confines of a fading Victorian tradition that has sought to correct the perceived wrongs of Romanticism, those sentimental excesses and the feminine prosody to which Frost responds with a call for masculine verse.5 John Ruskin, reacting against that feminine tradition, speaks of a loosened rationality inherent in the act of nature’s personification:

The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'Pathetic Fallacy'. (176)

Ruskin’s complaint against the act of projecting human adjectives onto the natural world amounts to a problem of falseness versus truth, a problem Frost’s work neither forgets nor wishes to solve. Certainly a poem like “For Once, Then,

Something,” calls into question the very search: for what does Ruskin find in the bottom of the well but the truth, or, ha, a pebble of quartz? And what of the aimless masses gazing seaward, able to see “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep”:

The land may vary more; But wherever the truth may be--- The water comes ashore, And the people look at the sea.

The truth, a loose compass for Frost against the shifting landscape where he has made his homes, stays rooted in the reality of working against a landscape that works back against him—as farmer, poultry farmer, New Englander, human being—while the viewers in this poem forget the place that surrounds them and gaze out at the visual fantasy of the sea.

45 Look how closely Ruskin’s critique traces out the path of the speaker in

“Ghost House,” as though Frost resists not pathetic fallacy, as Langbaum and

Pritchard argue, but literary critique itself—its histories and its nagging demands:

The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over- clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts, losing none of his weight. (178-9)

The arc of the white hot man that Ruskin describes follows the arc of the ghost house’s inhabitant. Frost’s speaker, too, is one of weakened mind, with a body ‘overclouded’ with emotion, able somehow through emotion to ‘vanquish’ the intellect, the power of those emotions to “make [the mind] believe what they choose.” Yet the man prefers in the end, the substantiating power of the intellect,

“even if he melts, losing none of his weight,” so that the ghost in facing his own ghostliness encounters only the silence of others, not of self, and his connection to the world proves Ruskin wrong—he indeed stands as a “whole man,” despite the disappearance of the surrounding structure. In fact, that demolished structure is suggestive of, as Ashbery says, “someone’s having built.” Frost, not

46 content with the mere proof of handiwork, identifies a new structure evolving from the old, the cellar hole filling with the colors and lights of life.

The house surviving as mere, or sufficient, cellarhole reappears in Frost’s

“The Generations of Men” where we find two cousins who “[…] take seats here on the cellar wall / And dangle feet among the raspberry vines.” Another cellar filled with wild raspberries, the question of refuge is addressed as both allegory and actuality: “Under the shelter of the family tree” one cousin affirms of their spot. “Just so,” replies the other, “that ought to be enough protection.” In a photograph of the Frost family beneath the ‘family tree’ you can find Robert

Frost rooted to his spot, dreaming of a protection for his family better than the flawed reality the world will provide6 (see figure a). The poet knows too well that if history, either ancestral or literary, should afford protection there are limits, one cousin adding: “Not from the rain. I think it’s going to rain.” Or, spinning the wheel again, perhaps the limits are merely perceived, the other cousin revealing to the reader: “It [is] raining.” Because this is Robert Frost, not

Pound, not Eliot, for further qualification the other cousin responds: “No, it’s misting; let’s be fair” (74).

The back and forth, a dialogue one suspects is sung in an effort to keep the world going, moves like the boy in “Birches,” between the branchy reality of one’s body beneath the tree and the soaring fears and dreams of the soul. It is the place where they are, the place from which the world is taken in and adjusted, which feeds their back and forth—beneath a tree the paradox of which is a rooted fluctuation. “Is it possible to conceive of anything that doesn’t rest on

47 something else?,” Frost writes in his notebooks, “Does [that not] prove the circularity of thought? Or the infinity?” (191).

The movement of thought, its infinite circularity rooted in a place, provides much of the prickling activity of Frost’s poems. His lost cellars echo with what the wind carries in from the world, and the water for the house still springs from the earth, though unused. Is it that our ideas inhabit the forms we have made? Frost wonders in his notebooks, “how ideas occupy place” (207).

One critic has suggested that man and place are “reciprocally enhancing” in

Frost, and that human consciousness is presented as an impediment to that relationship (Poirier 137). Frost’s sense of house and hillside, however, hovers nearer towards Bachelard’s discourse on the dreamlike confusions of inside and outside; the poems’ landscapes often do blend with the literary, with the mind, creating what the poet dreams as the landscape’s push back on the mind, capable of creating a “Territoriality of Ideas” (Notebooks 207).

While the family tree doesn’t offer full shelter, certainly the conditions are survivable there, for the moment. At the very least, as the speaker of the later

“On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations,” will note, the calm “seems certainly safe to last tonight” (246). With a joking precision, Frost adjusts the kind of nihilism that could escalate to apocalyptic vision. Despite the man’s tragedy, the poet’s song is sung, an attempt, as Frost’s granddaughter will one day attest, to “push back the dark and reduce the anxiety of life” (interview). To name such adjustment a germ of optimism feels not quite right. Rather, it is as if something of the poet’s self-consciousness suddenly sparked an awareness of the paradox of

48 speaking destruction. The paradox, unsustainable, tragically absurd, marks

Frost’s poetic sensibility against his life’s sufferings: the doomsayer, after all, has been around for ages, a prophetic fool, and the doomsayer in the self must be reasoned away:

It is true the longest drouth will end in rain, The longest peace in China will end in strife. Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break On his particular time and personal sight. That calm seems certainly safe to last tonight. (“On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations” 246)

As usual with Frost, the apocalyptic activity resists a one-sided development: the end of drought and the end of peace are incongruous from a human standpoint. Nor is the poem hoping for peace, as it suggests a desire for catastrophic occurrence in any form. As the planets move too slowly, again a human perception, to provide catastrophe, “We may as well go patiently on with our life,” the speaker laments, “And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun / For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.” And so Frost continues to adjust any apocalyptic predictions with a self-conscious laugh, a person’s place in the world however diminished—weighted by mood, weather, domestic unrest, unfulfilled desire, the grief of personal loss— alters not the landscape, but his own view of it.

49

figure a. Frost and family beneath the “Webster Pine”7

His later poems jest in full, where he explores the unyielding archetype of the doomsayer. Another rain falls in “The Broken Drought,” (363) but this rain vitiates the doomsayer’s predictions, leaving “the prophet of disaster” to curtail his shouting. It is Frost’s wry handling of the ongoing threat of the world’s destruction, the atrophy of our universal home as well as a specific crumbling structure, that must find solace in voice and continuing survival.

Because the doomsayer will not relinquish his doom by the penultimate couplet: “It was the drought of deserts. Earth would soon / be uninhabitable as the moon,” the speaking consciousness must take the poem away from him, with the help of the sonnet form which allows Frost a final departure, a closing couplet which the poet reclaims in hopes of pushing back the anxiety of

Modernist dread with a wry joke: “What for that matter had it ever been? / Who advised man to come and live therein?” (363). In other words, life on earth has

50 never been free of difficulty, but you make it your home as you spiral through space, and you hold on. Not quite a “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” the borrowed hymn which will comprise Williams’ mantra in Rutherford, New

Jersey. Still, Frost offers a sensible making-do, a desperation to work past grief and hardship and loneliness, something Jay Parini understood as Frost’s own way to stave off the debilitations of mental illness he witnessed in his sister

Jeannie8, which provides his own determination to carve out a place to work.

Whether Frost’s association with his place is designed as a picture frame for the public, or for his own sense of safety, comfort, and aesthetic, or for his own fears and anxieties, or all of those things, remains a question netted in a web of conflicting biography and prose jottings. You could stay right at home and see it all (859), Frost claims in 1959. To think of where Frost came to live—the self-built scholar of farm country with his history of dramatically contrasting dwelling places, posh California hotel; drab Massachusetts apartment; New Hampshire lakeside summer house—is to understand his willingness to write for “the casual” reader as much as for the classically enlightened reader he himself represents.

Upon J.D. Salinger’s recent passing, his wife said of their home in Cornish,

New Hampshire, “this beautiful spot afforded my husband a place of awayness from the world” (Marquard). But in his own New England, Frost found a way in.

His neighbors, the same ones patching up their old stone walls, kept him honest.

In his willingness to write the world that they shared, Frost departs from an increasingly Modernist desire for sheer intellectualism, and in his way subverts

51 the academic and book-learned code which sought to leave most readers at the front door of early twentieth century poetry, locked out.

Which is not to say Frost preferred a hollow simplicity, but that he found within the “living sounds of speech,” a quality which demanded no adornment greater than its own intrinsic richness. “Note,” he says, “the various tones of irony, acquiescence, doubt, etc. in the farmer’s ‘I guess so.’ ” (“The Imagining

Ear” 687). Like Salinger, and like William Carlos Williams in his way, Frost sought a speech that rang true to the human accent, a voice you would use at home. The trouble as he saw it, wasn’t in creating a poetic mysterious and difficult, demanding vast knowledge and education, but in reflecting the subtleties of the language as it is used by his New Hampshire neighbors, and in

“[getting those] tones down on paper” (687).

Frost sought not voice alone. The poem, like the home he worked to create for himself and his family, must provide a kind of desperate shelter. Throughout

Frost’s oeuvre one encounters ghost houses, spaces diminished but still made into something whole, places of refuge which offer, as Bachelard colors in his

Poetics of Space, by definition a place of both intellectual dreaming and mundane necessity. A place, as Frost says, that must take you in. As Stephen Dunn surmises of those homes to be found in art, the refuge which the poem offers can hold “more places than I could have imagined in which to hide, get lost, or be found” (“Art & Refuge”). Frost too recognizes the boundless resources of the house, revealed in its connection to the boundless resources of the mind, the mind which “becomes like the attic of a house you have long lived in. It is so full

52 of everything you can’t fail to find costume in it for carrying out plays of any period” (141).

This note is followed by two words: “maple sugar,” as though to illustrate the domestic play between intellect and everyday surroundings, between poems and shopping lists. In Frost, the vastness of such places can equally shelter both the surviving inhabitant of “Ghost House” whose place in the world, while vanished, remains filled with light and fruit, and the later voice of “Directive,” which more keenly feels the loss of the vanished place, the mereness of the hole signaled by the reductive “But only”: “Then for the house that is no more a house, / But only a belilaced cellar hole, / Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. / This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.”

In most cases, the places we encounter in Frost are being rediscovered, like the cord of maple in the “Wood-Pile,” seemingly abandoned places and forgotten acts which come to be repurposed as poetic material. The image of the rejoining dough, for instance, is a jarring one, at first, an image which forces us to look closely at the kneading act of human impression, a creative, domestic act overwhelmed by the strange science of the world, by the plasticity of the place itself. But it is just that plasticity, the ability to keep some degree of shape after change, which draws Frost to the farm, the apple orchard, the running brook. An everchanging refuge, a safe haven, for now. The house is a moving force and you, its inhabitant, are moving too:

Your destination and your destiny’s A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage.

53

While Dunn believes we learn from art what we learn from life, that

“there are no safe havens-for long,” the ability of the poem, like the house, to provide even temporary protection, the “momentary stay against confusion”

Frost sought from verse, lies at the emotional center of Frost’s poetic. Such a poetic hinges on the push of ‘confusion’ against the counterforce of ‘stay,’ revealing Frost’s belief that “no two things are as important in art and life as being threatened and being saved” (Newman 77).

“Directive” offers us a place for ourselves, a home, but one not untroubled by our inevitable movement within that place: “Your destination and your destiny.” The poem delivers our vital atrophy, a force which feeds itself, gives off energy, both goes and goes nowhere. As Bachelard suggests, immensity is achieved through the poetic imagination, through the “movement of motionless man” (184). The water of the house, an infusion of the surrounding world into the home, reveals how Frost troubles what Bachelard calls the “simple reciprocity [of inside and outside]” (216). These nuances and their conflict of forces—the pull forward and back, the human hand against the dough—is a tension which Frost traces by varying design throughout his years.

While a selection of poems flirt with a starker dichotomy—“the mask of gloom” presented by the trees in “Into My Own,” against the speaker’s wish for opposing depth, the away and back of “Birches,” the forward pull against the inertia of “Stopping By Woods on A Snowy Evening”—in a poem such as

“Directive” or “Ghost House,” Frost achieves an embodiment of Bachelard’s notion that “the dialectics of inside and outside multiply with countless

54 diversified nuances” (216), a poetic place where the earth springs within the house, and the motion is almost still, connected to nature, to its source. Through getting lost, then, one may attain the poem’s final sheltering illusion, a way home: “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” From the wellspring of poetic imagination, then, a refuge.

The determination to carve out a place of refuge in unlikely places—the past, the cellar of a disintegrated house, the attic of the mind—is realized in

Frost’s personal recollections as well as in his poems. The poet loved, for example, to retell how “The Butterfly” came to be written: in a fast and furious fashion in a locked room, as the poet’s sister’s banged insistently against the door

(Parini). What about the circumstances of the poem’s inception proved irresistible to Frost? The sense of a threatening force coming from within, inside the refuge of home, fits Frost’s poetic. “Poetry is neither the force nor the check,” wrote in his notebooks, “It is the tremor of the deadlock” (Notebooks 12). The poet might also have liked the idea that Jeannie’s knocking provided a kind of metric counter-rhythm, a notion he would later build into the “twang” of his play between meter and speech (853-859).9 Or the anecdote reveals Frost’s tremulous comic impulse, viewing the scene aslant to lighten the frantic pressures of the domestic sphere, a dark humor akin to the half-laughs we hear in a poem like

“Ghost House,” where the dead in their complete silence make ‘sweet companions.’

55 In art’s ability to transcend, even to be born, against that pressure, Frost’s creative process comes to be defined as the force of life against the force of art vying for its space in the world, the whole thing kept moving by the threat of silence and death. So, after his family’s many struggles and moves and domestic instabilities, if New Hampshire did come to offer the poet a safe haven of sorts, one ruffled by the losses which trouble and deepen the desire for such havens, the relationship is reciprocal: the poems written in New Hampshire; New

Hampshire written inside the poems. The home Robert Frost found there is memorialized in a speech Lawrance Thompson gave at a meeting of the New

Hampshire Historical Society in 1967, an essay titled “Robert Frost’s Affection for

New Hampshire.” The tribute, designed to bring more than one laugh from his

Granite State audience, challenges Frost’s title as poet laureate of Vermont.

Although the poet did reside just inside the Vermont border, Thompson says, the distinction should have named Frost “New Hampshire’s major poet, who is a strolling bard, and who spends some of his vacations in Florida, Massachusetts,

Vermont, and New Hampshire” (1).

For it is New Hampshire that will best revel in its relationship to the poet, paintings hung in living rooms titled “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy

Evening,”10 the same poem alongside a scenic photograph will grace a kitchen trivet11 (see figure b.), the various farms and homes preserved as museums.

Frost’s connection to this region stands so strong that places he touched are preserved not as museums alone, but as writing sanctuaries, parks, conference locations, sources of literal fruit.12 Sometimes, living in New England, it can feel

56 as though Frost’s oeuvre is inscribed on the very landscape, sketched over the distant views like a documentary shot in black and white. His farm in Derry offers the literal backdrop for so much of his work. So when Donald Hall writes his life from his old New Hampshire farmhouse, it is a trope we know well, a poetry infused by the sensuality of a particular world, its weather, agriculture, architecture. For Frost, however, the constancy of such a place lies always in question, playing out in the poems where the scene must bear the transformation of its landscape.

figure b. trivet containing a photograph of Robert Frost beside his famous poem, ready for a soup spoon.

Courtesy of the Milne Special Collections at the University of New Hampshire Libraries.

While the region proud to carry this poet’s attention glows in its picturesque landscapes, elsewhere Frost’s scenic connection to his place creates a

57 sort of guilt by association—an association that has manifested itself as a morbid apprehension by the literary world. To this day teachers correct readings of his most famous poems, not to examine the intricacy of tone involved in so much of the work, but, as one critic demands: to “close the hallmark card.” Just last winter, Teaching American Literature printed such a plea, one to consider “The

Road Not Taken” as a “Modernist expression of isolation” (Houston). Although, it is true, the poem does not correspond to the march of American individualism worried over by most critics as simplistically bland, Frost himself attributes to the piece a mockery of his friend Edward Thomas’ terminally peevish regretfulness.13

And if one looks deep enough into Frost’s notebooks, one finds signs of the poet’s own exhaustion with the histrionics of regret: “There is nothing more non existent and so silly to think and talk about as what might have been” (58).

Such mockery diminishes the potential power of a reading determined to track

‘Modernist isolation’ in the poem’s ironic twitches. Hearing the voice of the poem as it sings its pitch, however, can bring into relief a half-cruel comic portrait of human nature no less remarkable than the godless set of footprints

Modernism would imprint here. In fact, the poem’s ability to be of mixed use— as both a measure of comfort and critical potential—fits with Frost’s mode of tending to the desires of both the close reader and the ‘casual’ reader.14 As for comfort, for instance, my mother-in-law told me “The Road Not Taken” was recited recently at her friend’s funeral. As for critical potential, an undergraduate classroom shared with me the capacity for a renewed close reading to produce a

58 transformation in meaning from the glossed-over familiarity they held of the poem, a reorientation which one young man likened to “finding out there’s no

Santa Claus.”

It is indeed a fascinating insight into the way we read that the widespread misunderstanding of the poem stems from not having read it at all, not remembering it, or not bothering to finish its sentence—for if we do, apropos of the poem itself, the paths, of course, negate themselves: “And having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear; / Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” A widespread misreading seems another oxymoronic notion in itself, for few American poets have attained such widespread popularity as Frost, and with that popularity comes the rare potential for a familiarity so great that some poems are felt rather than read, handed down as cultural artifacts so worn they seem to require no examination, only held close or pushed away.

For Frost, the issue of his popularity appears less a problem than his potential for academic study. In his notebooks, he questions “Is Poetry Highbrow or Lowbrow?” but casts it aside, asserting that “the distinction in Poetry has no significance” (169). Still the question reappears again, seeming to haunt him, and the next time there is no rebuttal: “Is poetry highbrow?” (177). Frost’s wavering on the subject is not to say he doesn’t prefer a critical approach. Indeed, his notebooks reveal quite the opposite, presuming that a close reading can deliver all the more sustenance: “You can always get a little more literature,” he writes in his notebooks, “if you are willing to go a little closer into what has been left

59 unsaid as unspeakable, just as you can always get a little more melon by going a little closer to the rind or a little more dinner by scraping the plate with a table knife” (166).

Even Frost’s literary metaphors are served up at the domestic table. The house, its stable comfort and functional frame, grows dilapidated in the

Modernist waste land, looking outdated as formal verse. But in this artistically abandoned landscape, Frost makes his home. The man realizes a physiological connection to his place: “We can’t hope to be happy long out of New England,” he says, “I never knew how much a Yankee I was till I had been out of New

Hampshire a few months” (qtd in Thompson 16). The body, the house, the mind, the poem, all intertwine to create Frost’s peculiar brand of regionalism from which he distills a poetry fed by its own local streams.

As he and Elinor sat reading from great works of literature in their New

Hampshire farmhouse, their children stayed up late to listen. “Our hearts were being stretched, as were our minds,” reflects the poet’s daughter (qtd in Bober

67). The living aspect of the poet and the poem resists the absenteeism of early twentieth century American art, creating an active resistance to the kind of placelessness that Stevens will come to honor in “Description Without Place.”

His own place in Derry, New Hampshire offered Frost the first flint spark in creating “the pattern of farming, teaching, and writing poetry that was to continue for the rest of his life” (Bober 65). While Frost claims his poems do hold the “terrain of the Derry landscape,” the terrain is borne not by mere description of his farm, his house, his brooks and trees, or by a simplistic perspective of the

60 universe, but through Bachelard’s notion of the transformative and always shifting “function of inhabiting.” In poems like “Ghost House” and “Directive,” the desperate wish for repose makes the local endlessly vital. More than what is offered through a Modernist spyglass, Frost’s poems can best be seen under their own stars—dim, bright, blinking. There we find an imagination which rises from the act of living: This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.

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Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: A Biography. Boston: Houghton, 1996.

Monteiro, George. Robert Frost & The New England Renaissance. Lexington, KY: UP

of Kentucky, 1988. Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Holt, 1999.

Poirer, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Pritchard, William H. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. New York: Oxford UP,

1984.

Ruskin, John. “Of The Pathetic Fallacy.” Modern Painters: Of Many Things.

Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1894.

Stilgoe, John R. “Foreword.” The Poetics of Space. By Gaston Bachelard. 1964. 2nd

ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Thompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost’s Affection for New Hampshire. Derry, New

Hampshire: Robert Frost Trustees, 1967.

Timmerman, John H. Robert Frost: The Ethics of Ambiguity. Cranbury, New Jersey:

Rosemont, Associated UP 2002.

63 Notes

1 See Dunn’s “Art & Refuge” in the American Poetry Review, Sep/Oct 2006. 2 I have taken the liberty of adjusting or correcting errors in Frost’s punctuation and spelling from text excerpted from his Notebooks for readability throughout. 3 See Monteiro’s chapter on “Linked Analogies” for more on Terminus, an ancient God of Boundaries. 4 Pound’s review of North of Boston appears in Poetry Volume 5, December 1914, pp. 127. 5 See Frank Lentricchia’s essay, “The Resentments of Robert Frost,” for more about twentieth-century conceptions of masculinity and literature. 6 See figure a; the photograph is housed in the Milne Special Collections, University of New Hampshire Library, and was used by Lesley Lee Francis for the cover of her The Frost Family’s Adventure in Poetry: Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim, although there the image is cropped to remove most of the tree along with Lesley Frost’s outstretched hand which is holding the chain (attached to the tree) that is visible in the reproduction shown here. 7 Photograph of Frost and family; Milne Special Collections, University of New Hampshire Library. 8 See Parini’s Robert Frost: A Life to understand the difficulties the Frosts faced with depression and anxiety. 9 See his “Conversations on the Craft of Poetry” on pages 853-859 where he expresses his belief that rhythm must “ruffle the meter.” 10 A former student of mine at Boston College, a resident of New Hampshire, described such a painting hanging in her family’s living room. 11 See figure b; trivet is housed in the Milne Special Collections, University of New Hampshire Library. 12 From The Stone House in Shaftsbury, Vermont, Frost’s one-time residence and apple orchard, The Friends of Robert Frost have recently made available for purchase a tree graft of the Frost Snow Apple, a descendant of the same variety grown by the poet. 13 Stated in a letter to Louis Untermeyer in 1914; see Pritchard’s Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered for more on the ‘trickiness’ of the poem. 14 Frost claims to desire to perfect a subtle deception which allows for the ‘casual person’ to receive his work as “altogether obvious.” For more on the subject, see his letter to Louis Untermeyer dated January 1, 1917 (692).

64 LOCATING THE PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND:

A CONTRADICTION OF PLACE IN WALLACE STEVENS

-Chapter 2-

THE ONLY HAVEN

To fully understand Wallace Stevens, consider him in this light: as a modern embodiment of the Medieval “palmer,” walking to the insurance office in Hartford wearing two crossed palm leaves as a sign of pilgrimage.1 Wallace

Stevens was no holy man. Religious beliefs—perhaps encapsulated somewhere between the highly-anthologized “Sunday Morning” and the biographical whispers which both rumor and refute that he converted on his death-bed— manifest in his work mostly as an aesthetic obstacle to be overcome. The poet himself said it was “a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion” (CP 966). In search of this grand substitution, Stevens offers himself up as ‘Large Red Man Reading’ (CP 365), a poet capable of bringing dead and distant audiences to life, and figures himself, too, as the ‘Necessary Angel’ through whose poetic vision we “see the earth again” (CP 423). The artist’s task,

Stevens believed, was to deliver back to us the place in which we live, but his task was formed out of the very desires and frustrations of place which drove the poet to the Florida Keys in search of the golden birds missing in Hartford.

Despite his often intrepid atheism, I have begun to envision Stevens as such a man, crossed with palm-leaves, bound for holy lands. Certainly his palm- leaves are the ones discovered in his own worldly paradise of Southern Florida.

65 And although his departure in “Farewell to Florida” forces him to renounce that place’s charms—“I hated the weathery yawl,” he claims suspiciously, “I hated the vivid blooms”—from the “bleaching sand” of Stevens’ pilgrimage comes a golden glow shining against the place of his return, his “North,” which lies

“leafless” in “wintry slime” (CP 97-98). Stevens carries the palm leaf—ripped from the tree beneath which Apollo, God of, among other things, light and poetry, was born—as proof of this living thing which defies New England seasons, immortal.

In these palms the poet’s movement rustles, from North to South, from

Hartford to Key West, between adopted home and holiday retreat, and eventually between the cold and hot interior mappings of the mind. Such opposition of place manifests a contradiction of language in the poems’ resistances—“my North of cold” tries desperately to defy “her South of pine and coral and coraline sea”—and within that friction appears the troubled soul, simultaneously elsewhere and present. “Over the seas, to silent Palestine” travels the meditative woman of “Sunday Morning” (CP 53). Sated with caffeine and citrus, the room in which she meditates informs and construct her elsewhere— hints of the tropical within the mundane house, the world outside pressing in.

What will be the great substitution for God—home? the angel of the house? the man of the house? Not as a God, but as a God might be. Here is Stevens’ Large Red

Man—the poet in his house, the necessary angel of earth—he who becomes the world’s substitute Maker of the Earth and designer of climates. If not a religious pilgrimage in its true sense, the journey of Wallace Stevens is fraught with

66 longing and questions of place. Those questions begin in the “Snow Man” (CP 8) where the landscape contains two visions of nothing viewed by a lost soul, one present and one absent, held simultaneously—and lead to places where the body, in a kind of Floridian golden freedom, can construct its own house from those rustling leaves and build its own fire.

It would take time for the poet to achieve a sense of home. As a young man in love, Stevens had dreamt of “[turning] the whole country into a home with sunsets for hearths, and evening stars for lamps” (L 85). But by the late winter of 1909, Stevens, not yet thirty, he had begun to despair. Working and residing in New York, he had begun to experience the slow realization of his displacement from his childhood home in the country of Reading, Pennsylvania.

His memory of the idyllic countryside was a stark contrast against his new residence in New York. “What we call country [in New York] isn’t at all what you call country [in Reading].” Here, he complained, country is “simply a place where there aren’t many houses” (L 148).

The poet begins to confront the divide between here and there, between his new environment and his now-lost and distant home, writing to his future wife: “What am I then? Something that but for you would be terribly unreal. A dreamy citizen of a native place—of which I am no citizen at all” (L 131). Stevens’ disorientation in the city— an isolation other writers of the period embraced as a source of their art—only deepened through his new connection to Elsie Moll. In her, Stevens discovers the genius loci of Reading, a place which he had for too long romanticized. In his beloved, he claims, the old world exists: “Sometimes I

67 am all memories. They would be all dream except that you make them otherwise” (L 131). To float, apart from home, only to connect with an inhabitant of that increasingly distant and unreal place, is a jarring love experience for

Stevens, who found himself suddenly ‘reorganized’ through Elsie’s connection to his hometown:

It is as if I were in the proverbial far country and never knew how much I had become estranged from the actual reality of the things that are the real things of my heart, until the actual reality found a voice—you are the voice. (L 131)

Elsie triggers Stevens’ forgotten sense of home, his estrangement made suddenly apparent. The poet’s resulting nostalgia is further reinforced by a poem he and Elsie have come upon in a volume of verse by Arthur Willis Colton, entitled “The Return.” Stevens references it at the letter’s close to aggrandize a mundane complaint—as he is apt to do. First he quotes Colton’s poem in part:

“Though palmer bound, I shall return/ --/ From Eden beyond Syria” (L 132).

Then Stevens reflects, by way of comparison to the holy journey, “I feel as if I had been returning to-night—from very rough water to the only haven I have” (L

132). He is talking of course about the tedious pressure of work at the insurance office, alleviated only slightly by the comparative haven of his dull rented room.

I think of Hopkins complaining over the serious hell of grading midterms. The metaphor quivers under the weight. But Stevens is moved to find in Colton’s

“Return,” which is something of a mock-epic in its own right, a dream of home to which he can relate. Here is Colton’s poem, as Stevens and Elsie, in the year leading up to their marriage, would have encountered it in its entirety:

The Return

68

I have a home, though palmer bound For holy lands, I pine for it; I know its sheltering walls around The hearth and lamp that shine for it, The door apart;

I shall return on windward seas By blue shores of Illyria To find it filled with melodies From Eden, beyond Syria. It is your heart. 2

Stevens’ letter of February 15, 1909 treats Elsie as a sentimental embodiment of home, just as Colton treats his beloved—as a conceit of shelter.

The lines Stevens quotes from the poem, however, leave out the final metaphor and reveal only the notion of returning to an actual abode. In his reference, there is no acknowledgment of the conceit’s final revelation that the beloved is the home and hearth. Forgetting that final turn, in the sheer longing of the poem’s architectural imagery, we can understand the desire of Wallace Stevens. It is a desire for a home. For a safe domestic space. For a fire burning.

Stevens’ letters repeatedly express the importance of the home’s hearth, a significance solidified by his connection to Colton’s poem.3 In a typically defensive posture—here regarding his lack of writerly productivity and his general absence from the literary social scene—Stevens cavorts in a rare letter to

Williams, written in October, 1925 soon after the birth of his daughter Holly:

“But oh la-la: my job is not now with poets from Paris. It is to keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby’s chariot turning and that sort of thing” (L 246). “That sort of thing,” the domestic life of the home,

69 busies Stevens in a way which ties him bodily to the fireplace’s warmth, a central image of necessity which serves as both ambiance and function.

As Eleanor Cook points out, the hearth’s significance is further reflected in its crucial appearance as the first indoor setting to appear anywhere in Stevens.

The fireplace arrives in Harmonium’s “Domination of Black,” along with the haunting repetition of “in the room.” The fireplace offers what Cook calls a

“memory-place” (44)—in it we can locate the center of the home, its stories, its synecdochical primacy. It is a fire that burns within the poems, a poetic image of the sort sought by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, one which reverberates both on the page and in the house itself, a mutual reverie in which the inhabitant and the hearth require one another. Cook leaves out the fireplace’s interpolation of dark and light, and the way the night presses in within its hemlock colors triggering haunting peacock cries in the poetic imagination, endangering the presumed safety of that American hearth which once offered, according to Ralph

Waldo Emerson, a “tumultuous / privacy of storm,” the “memory-place” in fact a lyric trope proffered in 1868 by John Greenleaf Whittier:

Sit with me by the homestead hearth, And stretch the hands of memory forth To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze! (52)

Stevens’ fire darkens the tradition.

LIKE LANDSCAPE ITSELF

Around the time of his letter in which Stevens joins Colton in this deep daydream of a warm domicile—what we might consider Stevens’ epistolary ode to the house—Stevens will pen a handful of poems in which the house and its

70 rooms present a place of desire4: the dreamy “Disillusionment of Ten O’ Clock”

(CP 52) in which domestic longing spills into evening dreams, where even the plainly adorned yield a mystical inhabitation: “The houses are haunted/ By white night-gowns.” Or the room in which Peter Quince plays his clavier, a room which launches the inhabitant into a daydream of the beloved: “Here in this room, desiring you” (CP 72). The music, the space, the body, combine to create a place to be, to dream—the poem achieves the house’s duty to foster the imagination, to cultivate reverie, what Bachelard’s Poetics of Space names as the

“function of inhabiting.”

The place you inhabit determines your poetic reverie, Stevens believed.

“The imagination is quite satisfied with definite objects, if they be lofty and beautiful enough,” he writes in 1906, “It is chiefly in dingy attics that one dreams of violet cities” (L 91). This is the same year that he writes an article on how to redecorate an attic. But as residences change—the views, the furniture, the occupants—Stevens comes to leave behind the notion that the imagination alone is sufficient to color the world. The poet begins to recognize that the place itself, and one’s connection to it, matters. Just a year or two after dreaming of violet cities from a dingy attic, the poet confesses his feeling of disconnection from

Reading: “I have been away from home for eleven years […] Yet it remains the only familiar spot in the world. My little sleepless trips home every little while do not get me in touch. I do not feel the strength of the place under me to sustain” (L 108).

71 Stevens’ weakening sense of home, despite his familiarity with that significant place of origin, finds its figure in the obstructive “firecat” of “Earthy

Anecdote” (CP 3):

Every time the bucks went clattering Over Oklahoma A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went, They went clattering, Until they swerved In a swift, circular line To the right, Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved In a swift, circular line To the left, Because of the firecat.

The firecat, as the thwarter of desire, obstructs the bucks as they move through and toward their place. In their swervings, new paths emerge. Before long, the clattering of the deer as they are chased and blocked, along with the leaping and bristling of the firecat, begins to constitute the very dance of the place. If there is a purposeful movement in the bucks’ initial clattering, the firecat transforms that purpose: here connection with place is altered by the beings of the place, their longings and fears, their faces and limbs. Stevens’ own wanderings have become part of his new landscape, his Oklahoma: “I’m busy,” he writes,5 “A walk now and then, a little music, a few pages, a trip home at Thanksgiving time—there’s no Iliad in that. I feel strenuous, not lyrical” (L 93). Longing for the lyricism of life, lacking “the strength of the place under me to sustain,” the poet’s frustrated sense of the world takes the form of the obstructive firecat, which leads, if not

72 home, to a new, transformed place. The firecat holds the dream of the fireplace in it. As Robert Pack has suggested, the “architecture of reality” as Stevens understands it, exists as a “structure of infinite correspondences and resemblances” (61). In “Earthy Anecdote” we encounter a place “not static, but dynamic,” one in which “the world is still in the process of being created” (Pack

61).

The landscape of “Earthy Anecdote” offers such a place of exchange and modification. It is a modification the poet understands as a necessary adjustment for the sake of connection to a place in the middle of his life, at the beginning of his career. “The trouble is I keep looking at [Reading] as I used to know it,” the young poet writes to his wife from New York, “I do not see it as it is. I must adjust myself; because I do not intend to shut myself off from the heaven of an old home” (L 181). The landscape and its figures continue their dance, adjusting themselves as they go, determined to keep open “the heaven of an old home:”

The bucks clattered. The firecat went leaping, To the right, to the left, And Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes And slept.

The poem so strongly holds transformation at its core that by the end of the lyric, the bucks and their clattering yield their focal point to the firecat, whom, in its bristling blockade, we had perhaps not considered as the wise, ‘bright-eyed’ feline named in the final stanza.

73 “Pictures of landscape,” the poet once surmised, “like landscape itself, disappear without a trace” (L 134). Stevens is speaking of his memory of viewing paintings of place at one of his many visits to New York galleries, a memory which, he concludes, has evaporated. For Stevens, who “never [fails] to think of the country about Reading,” who wishes to “run over + see all the roads + hills again,” the evaporation is a personal dislocation—those places “do not seem real to me unless I am there”6 (L 42). In the closing moment of “Earthy Anecdote,” the firecat in its sleep abandons the bucks whose clattering has come to depend on the cat-manipulated paths. Without the firecat, the bucks crash into each other, no longer corralled. Disconnected, they scramble into the suddenly unbridled landscape. Without the intrusive guide of their own obstructed longing, they disappear.

It takes some time before Stevens can face his own disappearance from his home place. The poet writes scathingly of the city at first, claiming, at best, that

New York “makes me appreciate the opposite of it all”7 (L 38). Soon, he is wondering at his own romanticization of Reading, claiming his memory had gone through “the customary rose-color process” (L 38). Upon a visit home in the spring of 1900 he finds “the real was not the ideal. I found the place, but hardly recognized it” (L 39). Although growing disillusioned with his childhood home, the poet continues to lack a full connection to his new habitat, still finds New

York “a wretched place—with its infernal money-getting.”8 Within this divide is built the incongruous poet of the country and the city, who, like the bucks evading the firecat, for some time, creates an oppositional dance in-between.

74 “My liking for [New York and for Reading] are…quite different,” Stevens speculates at the turn of the century, the difference “amounts to this,” he surmises—“that I saw Reading first”9 (L 45). But Stevens’ romanticization of his origins creates an often painful rift of here and away, a city which comes to seem marred by the poignant reminiscences of country life, or a country which seems suddenly to be “the acme of dullness” when compared to New York, “this electric town which I adore”10 (L 52). His quatrains from his poem of 1900, “A

Window in The Slums” paint the division (L 40):

I think I hear beyond the walls The sound of late birds singing. Ah! what a sadness those dim calls To city streets are bringing.

While the birds’ songs bring an ill-fitting bit of the natural world into the poet’s city streets, it is the children of the poem who bring the greatest friction. In their imagined other-worlds, the poet recognizes a discrepancy of place:

[…] Voices far sadder intervene Sweet songs with longing weighted—

Gay children in their fancied towers Of London, singing light Gainst heavier bars […]

For Stevens, this meaningful discrepancy —the slight yet strange opposition of a New York City street to the “fancied towers of London”— accentuates what happens when an inhabitant dreams of elsewhere. Such dreaming leads to an often painful awareness of the incongruity of a place. When something from there mistakenly enters here, as though from another world— mournful bird song displaced from the country trees, castles dreamt of in a

75 rundown alley—the speaker reels from the disparity. These figures of divergence are early versions of the shivering witness who appears, in a more abstracted guise, in Stevens’ “Snow Man.”

Bachelard sheds some light on Stevens’ troubled scene when he says that, although “the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” (6), place is complex. “Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another” (6). Early in his career, the act of reverie has not yet achieved a union of place for Stevens. The poet will work through a lifetime of poems before achieving the daydream—that which

Bachelard names “the binding principle” (6)—capable of integrating the opposing times, and for Stevens, the interfering locales, which trouble his connection to his environment.

HERE IN THIS ROOM

Through these startling superimpositions of place, Stevens surveys his compiled spatial experiences. Through the dawning realization of his separation from his childhood home, he still dreams of a reconnection with that place of origin, imagining that something or someone, like Elsie, might return his home to him in full, as dreamt in this poem of 1907/08:

The house fronts flare In the blown rain; The ghostly street lamps Have a pallid glare.

A bent figure beats

76 With bitter droop, Along the waste Of vacant streets. (L 108)

The figure, for whom the world is a vacancy, invents a return to that home now lost, a dream of a “glimmering,” a reverie in which the body might reconnect with its place in the world:

Suppose some glimmering Recalled for him, An odorous room— A fan’s fleet shimmering.

Of silvery spangle— Two startled eyes— A still trembling hand, With its only bangle (L 108).

The poem, too revealing in its mundane wish for that odorous room which the beloved could deliver—the room in which the scented body emerges, regenerated piece by piece from behind a woman’s fan—remains left out of the

June book Stevens prepared for Elsie11 (L 108-9).

Although these poems get left behind because of their overt candor,

Stevens continues on his theme of homesickness past the turn of the century, perhaps most noticeably in his translation of Joachim du Bellay’s “Regrets,” renamed by Stevens as “Sonnet from the Book of Regrets.” Stevens sends his work to Elsie in the summer of 1909 after spending “the whole day—a gorgeous, blue day—in my room, reading [and translating]…” (L 151). With heavy hand in asserting his discontent, the poet—through du Bellay—lays bare his longing for home:

When shall I see once more, alas, the smokey haze Rise from the chimneys of my little town; and when:

77 What time o’ the year, look on the cottage-close again, That is a province to me, that no boundary stays? (L 151)

And while Stevens finds in du Bellay a common emotive note, he also takes comfort in the way the language of the poem offers an alternative “glimmering” to that which the poem of 1907/08 had attributed to the woman figure. Here the beloved is revealed as the language of place. In “Sonnet from the Book of

Regrets” the lines of the poem—its anaphora and naming of places—create a linguistic flight traversing land and time which reaches, if not the childhood home, the music of a comforting song. And if not the fathers’ house, then, the mother’s lullaby:

The little house my fathers built of old, doth please More than the emboldened front of Roman palaces: More than substantial marble, thin slate wearing through, More than the Latin Tiber, Loire of Angevine, More, more, my little Lyré than the Palatine And more than briny air the sweetness of Anjou. (L 151)

Stevens’ translation offers us his professed pleasure in rustic Reading—the little house my fathers built of old—against shining New York’s substantial marble.

Bachelard understands the childhood home, du Bellay’s “little house,” as a foundation for poetic memory and reverie, a yardstick against which the rest of the world might be measured. Against that home comes the contradiction of the world, the interferences. In du Bellay, Stevens discovers a poetic which he will embrace in the decades to come: the power of the poem to depart from its heartsick journey, the power of a land of words to illuminate the mundane paradox of living. Poetic language dreams of transcending the impoverished place: “More, more, my little Lyré.”

78

A SECRET PLACE IN THE ANONYMOUS COLOR OF THE UNIVERSE

I wonder how different Wallace Stevens’ oeuvre would sound were the poet to have resided permanently in his birthplace of Reading, Pennsylvania. I feel certain those are not poems we would still be reading. They would lack the mind’s quest to construct a place out of the world in which the body can dwell, would lack the desire for a home, which fires almost every Stevens poem at its innermost hearth. “I must find a home in the country—a place to live in, not only to be in,” he wrote in his journal, a young man lost in New York City, in the summer of 1902 (L 58). It’s a desire that, when Helen Vendler saved us12 by identifying it in part decades ago, slipped confoundedly into her classification of romantic love. But Stevensian desire is a homesickness. Romantic love is merely one of its complications. The poet’s letters and later poems reveal it, as do his restless yet confined movements North and South between Hartford and Key

West, and later when travel lessens—his mental projections reveal it too: A mirage of the tropics within his Connecticut. A palm tree trembling at the edge of the mind. A dream of connection between body and place. It is a quest both revealed and retracted, a quest eerily similar to Robert Frost’s desire for “a poem you can repose in,” but, which that poet was quick to qualify: “maybe you don’t ask to feel secure” (213). Like Frost’s, Stevens’ poems rarely reveal the problem itself—the homesickness driving him to find a connection between body and place—as he conducts poetic experiments in creating a house built of memory and words, composed of the sun, composed of ourselves, as Stevens writes in

79 “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (CP 397). The poem, after all, remains

“part of the res itself and not about it” (CP 404). But as the poet goes on, as we read on in his life’s work, and we get a fuller sense of the blueprint, we discover those times when Stevens sees that we—as poets and readers—“fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form” and further, those vivid moments when the form reveals “a secret place/ In the anonymous color of the universe” (Ordinary

Evening CP 401). It is in those secret places that I aim to read Stevens.

How does Stevens’ oeuvre, known best for its fantastic diction and play of word against image, manifest a dream of place? A poem like “Description

Without Place,” in which the poet famously rejects William Carlos Williams’ brand of localism, tries to support the poet’s theory that “We live in the mind,”

(Adagia 904). But the poet’s desire for comfort and belonging, for a fire-placed living room that just might withstand the pressures of the poetic imagination as does Emerson’s, and Whittier’s, will lead him to the actual streets of New Haven, wondering “Of what is this house composed if not of the sun”? (CP 397). In seeking an answer to this question, Stevens will work out his desire for a connection to place, his speaker seeking an increasing pressure on the self, wanting something sufficiently strong to ground the body and its dream of wandering. The poet seeks, ultimately, a home which—even if built of light, half- imagined—might feel sufficient, a place of refuge.

HIS ONLY TESTAMENT AND ESTATE

80 And if the difficulty of Stevens’ work is in fact the difficulty of holding back this secret wish to belong, then there is room for misreadings of all kinds.

Bloom, for example, mistakes Stevens’ repression as a ‘transcendental strain.’

Thus, when he reads in “The Sail of Ulysses” that

In the generations of thought, man’s sons And heirs are powers of the mind, His only testament and estate. He has nothing but the truth to leave. How then shall the mind be less than free Since only to know is to be free? (CP 465) he finds a “Transcendental idealization,” and further, “a lie, not just against time but even more audaciously against the condition of our existence as knowers”

(Poetry and Repression 272-3), and thus he himself misreads the text. If the first idea in Stevens is the idea itself, then the second is the inevitable covering up of that idea. Reeling from having come to see that we have “nothing but the truth to leave,” the poet tacks on one of his zen-like enigmas, his transcendental fiction—

“How then shall the mind be less than free/ Since only to know is to be free?”

This is the question of an outmoded, slightly foolish hero, not the idealized thinker whom Bloom sees. Stevens’ ideas of the failure of classical notions of nobility and spirituality in his current age, addressed most fully in “The Noble

Rider and the Sound of Words,” coupled with the significance he placed on home ownership13, give good cause to understand his mythic heroes as outdated figures. Through this lens, the gift of truth imbued by Ulysses would be considered a failure of assets, as opposed to, say, a house.

Further, Stevens has long established just such a cycle of divulgence and cover-up. And while Vendler frequently overwhelms her mapping of desire with

81 romantic love, she reads beautifully Stevens’ tendency for “receptivity and flinching”—here in “Ulysses” such “exquisiteness of response” is in full play

(Words 4). This is a late poem, and while Stevens’ habit of “receptivity and flinching” is deeply engrained, by this point the poet has found his way out of the choices “between.” Thus “the living man” in his “present place” (CP 465) on his current sea cannot negate the dream-place of elsewhere. Both Hartford and

Key West can exist as part of the amassing harmony as the poem closes:

As if another sail went on Straight forwardly through another night And clumped stars dangled all the way (CP 467)

At its core, then, such oscillations reveal Stevens’ philosophical bent for contradiction: the restless mind’s habit of holding one true thing only briefly before jumping to its opposite, the very thing that renders the first thing false.

But here, what Bloom mistakes as Stevens’ Emersonian “wildness of his own knowing” (273) is the flinching from an utterance which comes too close to the truth at its core: a man’s lament over the loss of that very place he might actually call home. In Bloom’s terms, it is Stevens’ “subtle mode of self-defense” (268).

Writing this, I am struck by a convex similarity to Ben Jonson, the Cavalier poet who, using lyric to concoct an often idealized domestic space, could not help but insert himself and begin to plead for money or a decent meal. In this sense, Jonson was an early Stevens, who, instead of backing away from such self- revelation, moved towards it, slipped right into the mundane secret, often to comic effect. For Jonson, the desire is domestic as well: the country-house and the good glass of canary wine “which most doth take my Muse, and mee.14” Stevens,

82 too, discovers the cherished ordinary within a grand, cosmic homelessness. It is something he achieves through the intangibility of “his only testament and estate,” where the physical estate is omitted, and the hearth that should have formed the center of the home has been irrevocably lost.

Stevens uses his metaphysical pivots as repressions once he suspects his inner world has been reduced to such a plain and sentimental yearning. It is a contradiction which serves to avoid the necessary failure of all metaphor, of all certainty of knowing, a contradiction which allows for a change in seasons and the inevitable shift of moods. It is also a contradiction at the heart of the human condition: part of the awe, dissatisfaction, and adjustment which occurs when we confront our desire to connect to a particular place, something Stevens noted in his journal as early as the summer of 1899:

The first day of one’s life in the country is generally a day of wild enthusiasm. Freedom, beauty, sense of power etc. press one from all sides. In a short time, however, these vast and broad effects lose their novelty and one tires of the surroundings. This feeling of having exhausted the subject is in turn succeeded by the true and lasting source of country pleasure: the growth of small, specific observation. (L 30)

From the enlargement of the human soul to the subsequent boredom of a day in the idealized countryside, Stevens’ contradictions reflect the restlessness of desire. There are conflicts which crop up between his prose and poetry, and fictions revealed through his letters —one which paints the same story quite differently to his wife and a friend15—along with instabilities that waver inside the seeming certainties of the poems. In short, the conflicts of the human mind.

From his very language springs precise contradiction—“an insolid billowing of

83 the solid” (CP 472)—a receptivity and flinching on which later generations of poets will build, “mere experts”16 of contemporary verse.

A POINT IN THE FIRE OF MUSIC

It is a desire long misnamed in Stevens poetry17, this hidden wish for a place to belong. Yet it has been sensed, intuited, glossed, and misread. It has been named a “vision of the originary past,” a purely biographical link to

Reading, Pennsylvania. Tantalizingly named an “inescapable psychology,”18

Stevens’ desire for a connection to his place nears Frost’s fantasy in “To

Earthward” where the poet transforms himself from one who lives “on air/ which crossed me from sweet things,” into a masochist of physicality, seeking a violence between self and world which might achieve a sense of connection, of belonging. “The hurt is not enough,” Frost concludes in that poem, “I long for weight and strength/ To feel the earth as rough/ To all my length.”

While both poets want to stake out a place beyond Romanticism with their strikingly different lyricisms, they can’t seem to shake a wish for the Sublime, and it is from this tension that the Modernist Sublime is born. These post-

Romantics seek to heal a rift. Frost through destructive transformation (that of fire, in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” or the repurposing decay of the “The Wood-Pile”); Stevens through a coerced union of place, the dictated geography of the firecat’s “Earthy Anecdote” or the absent and present nothingness glimpsed in “The Snow Man,” and later the achieved dwellings of the short lyrics of The Rock. Readings of Modernism continue to seek out a kind

84 of poetic wallowing in urban isolation, a mode largely sustained by works such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos. Such traditionally “Modernist” readings, perhaps stemming from Lionel Trilling’s insistence that Frost’s work was ‘terrifying,’19 and perpetuated by collections of criticism like the one in

“Bloom’s Major Poets” series which bolsters Frost’s difficulty first and foremost, tend to railroad these poets into a singular vision of Modernism. In an urbane fear of sentiment, attachment, and connection to a place, Stevens, Frost, sometimes Williams, are often read through a Modernist spyglass. Because

Stevens’ nuanced involvement with his local world is often suppressed, revealed in flashes and inconsistencies, he is the most likely to be misunderstood. But finding a place to call home was a lifelong quest for this poet who claimed to live in the mind. It is an involvement which binds him much more closely to his

American compatriots and their connections to their place than many have allowed.

To escape the estrangement of body in an enduringly foreign place,

Stevens, like Frost, seeks any number of external realities to appeal to: weather, walks through the city, music, memory, the interplay of internal and external spaces in the mind and in the house. Understood through Gaston Bachelard’s cajoling exposition which bears out ways architecture can spring open the imagination, or in the light of Vendler’s suggestion that Stevens’ ‘local objects’ are ‘matrices’ of lyric source “through which, insights and integrations came”

(Words 6), Stevens uses the external pressure of a place to provide a counterforce to his imaginings.

85 The earth is not a building but a body (Adagia CP 902), Stevens writes, a body to push back against his own. Stevens’ physical contact with place becomes that which might satisfy his deepest desires. In “Description Without Place” the “we” of the poem dreams of

a change immenser than A poet’s metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of music where Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

That we do not need to understand, complete Without secret arrangements of the mind. (CP 298)

As with Frost’s transformation in “To Earthward,” this change would be physical. The climactic epiphany realized through music is, after all, a bodily connection to sound, a vacation from the restless mind, which here, for a moment, like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion, rests satisfied. For

Stevens, seeking a physical equilibrium between body and place—something resonant of Newton’s Third Law, that for every force there exists an equal and opposite counterforce—such a place would allow for a sort of reverie of belonging. Only in the interplay between self and one’s environment can a fundamental peace occur.

AN INVISIBLE ELEMENT OF THAT PLACE

Stevens wasn’t looking for a profound and “relentless contact”20 with the environment as were Emerson and Whitman, nor an interpersonal contact as

86 with Williams, whose reverence for those who find ways to integrate place and community finds its ideal in Père Sebastian Rasles who, as missionary to an

Abenaki tribe in Maine, became an Abenaki himself, insofar as it was possible for him to do. Stevens, conversely, finds an ultimate “dwelling in the evening air” consisting of himself alone.21 But because he is perpetually homesick, his work pretends to forget place altogether, until those rare moments when he allows himself the indulgence of imagining a home.

“Life is an affair of people not of places,” Stevens writes in his Adagia, but then he confesses, “for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble” (CP

901). Anything other than the solitary self, anything in nature of the other or of others, would merely complicate the scenery, like those shadowy figures consumed by their place in “Anecdotes of Men By the Thousand” (CP 41). There body and place merge to the point of disappearance: “There are men of a province/ Who are that province.” But the declaration is qualified by Stevens’ attribution of the idea to an unnamed “he” through which the poem invites irony

(a critique of Williams, for example,22 that poet for whom the province is the poem).

There are men whose words Are as natural sounds Of their places As the cackle of toucans In the place of toucans.

While Stevens tries to ridicule Williams’ local language poetic, it is

Stevens himself who seems to break through in the toucan’s cackles, the ring of

Key West in the inner ear, dulling the poem’s potential irony and catching the

87 poet off guard as the heuristic act of writing brings forth, like “the dress of a woman of Lhassa,” his own formerly invisible connections. Now the poet, shocked by his own revelation, must consider the possibility that he himself desires the very connection to place he had hitherto mocked. “The mandoline is the instrument/ Of a place,” Stevens forays, before he moves into a mode of earnest questioning:

Are there mandolines of western mountains? Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

In other words, might there exist a connection of people and place, of speech and poetry, of art and function, here in the actual world as well as in the poem:

The dress of a woman of Lhassa, In its place, Is an invisible element of that place Made visible.

“That place / Made visible.” Thus the poet comes, against his will, to understand how an inhabitant manifests a connection with the literal fibers of her home, the weave and color of the place made for a moment tangible.

A MAN WITHOUT A HOME

While Frost would come to embrace the New England environment of his early boyhood, and Williams committed himself to his hometown in Rutherford,

New Jersey, the work of both of these poets becomes a looking hard and close at one’s surrounding architecture. Rooted in personal connections to their geography, both poets superimpose a layering of memories upon the local houses and streets. Frost tracks cellar holes and haunts woods in hopes of

88 rediscovering a child’s lost playhouse, while Williams finds life everywhere around him, in the houses of his townspeople, in glass-strewn alleys, and the rumbling river. And while Frost seeks in earnest for that playhouse in the woods, searching for lost dreams of wholeness beyond confusion, Williams rubs clean the smudged window panes of Paterson looking for that ‘beautiful thing.’ For those poets, spatial memory and historical familiarity—what might be essentially described as a sense of place—are manifested in the very language they use.

Stevens, on the other hand, remains the outsider looking in, for all appearances, a metaphysician walking on the moon. But he harbors a secret, ordinary wish—for a place to call home. Without the full sense of home that

Gaston Bachelard calls a springboard for reverie, Stevens’ poems come to manifest a desire for a welcoming space, a place which might just barely exist, one which could heal the disconnection between himself and the world.

Connecticut, of course, does not qualify as an immeasurable distance from

Stevens’ hometown less than 300 miles away, but once he arrives in Hartford, he discovers a new world for himself and his new wife, an adopted almost-home which will initiate the poet’s lifelong quest for belonging.

The desire seeps out at times, naked despite the stylish clothes of “The

Well Dressed Man with a Beard” (CP 224). In this poem the poet lets slip a yes after “the final no.” Or, at least, that is where the poem begins. In it we find the sweet country of Stevens’ reverie, rose-colored Reading: “douce campagna, honey in the heart,/ Green in the body, out of petty phrase.” A confusion of countryside, love, living things, treed world—the little scrap of the poem held up

89 against the blowing universe. From that confusion, it is the house alone which will, as Bachelard says, integrate. There within, the poet traces “the form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,/ The aureole above the humming house…”

Almost safely enclosed in the warmth of that room, the house’s interferences, its humming of body and place, launch the speaker again into a restless daydream of elsewhere: “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”

Stevens’ desire for a containing place surfaces throughout Parts of A World.

“Arrival at the Waldorf” (CP 219), where the speaker returns from a trip to

Guatemala, exposes the same disorder of desire in which “the wild poem is a substitute/ For the woman one loves or ought to love,/ One wild rhapsody a fake for another.” As with “The Well-Dressed Man,” “Arrival at the Waldorf” moves toward the confluence of shelter and body. Romantic desire masks the poem’s true intimacy of person and place which occurs when “you touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight/ Or sunlight”—and physicality becomes ethereal: “and you hum and the orchestra/ Hums…” The sheltering place, like the poem, brings a sensorial music, which triggers the elsewhere within the here:

“alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.” A capacity to name “green and actual Guatemala” reveals how Stevens’ Snow Man has grown. Now a guest at the Waldorf, he grows capable, for a moment, of a mind of summer. Going away and coming back has brought the remembered landscape into leafy relief as he arrives at the Waldorf Hotel, a palmer returning from holy lands.

“Stevens was a man without a home,” Vendler has noted (Words 6), though she understands his homelessness as a result of a bad marriage, and

90 resolves it through the poet’s attachment to the local landscapes he found in

Hartford, such as Elizabeth Park and the Connecticut River—stand-ins for his wife (Words 6). Stevens himself felt that “he was a spirit without a foyer” (“Local

Objects,” CP 473) and his work, through its thorny contradiction of place, offers a sense of the poet’s emotional and spatial quest for a home, his search for what

Bachelard terms “the function of inhabiting.” It is in Connecticut that Stevens will learn to use the poem as a means for probing his chronic sense of homesickness, pouring alcohol on a wound in an attempt to heal himself. In truth, his longing for a place he might fully inhabit, a place seen through burning eyes, pervades his poems in a way that even our greatest readers of Stevens have failed to fully value. Read with a hunger in the chest, even the most cryptic lines fall into step, something Helen Vendler tried to get at through Stevens’ married life, but which existed in the man himself long before Elsie, and which best illuminates the poet’s affair with the Florida Keys. In the end, it was a place to call home which became his sought-after beloved.

THE LOCATION OF MODERNISM

How does Stevens’ unnamed desire for a place where the body is at home fit into the grander Modernist architecture? It has been said that Stevens came to

“cultivate his isolations” (Longenbach 120) and that his “Description Without

Place,” like Eliot’s Waste Land, denotes “a site in which the alienation of the modern urban experience becomes both an analogue and a model for the cultural fragmentation of the modernist era” (Davis & Jenkins 15). But where Stevens’

91 desire intersects the broad view of Modernism, along the lines of his isolation in the public sphere, his fragmentation is nothing less than an expression of a yearning for a place he can call home. And while he may claim in his Adagia that

“Poetry is not personal” (CP 902), it is often within his most impersonal of poems that the personal covertly resides. There is, at the heart of Stevens, always the difficulty of reconciling such contradictions. When he demurely states, “I don’t think you’d understand this unless you wrote it” (Brazeau 121), we recognize that the comprehension of such poems is aided by reading them as though we indeed had written them ourselves, with a secret up our sleeve, compact with our own concealments and revelations, whether aggrandized or belittled.

Consider, for example, Stevens’ overly-certain “Snow Man,” whose desire is frozen within the nihilism of the wintry landscape. The ice acts as a shield to the intimate witness of place which the poem holds at its core, its clandestine landscape. Stevens himself claims the poem “as an example of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it” (L 464). The reality- imagination continuum provides Stevens one of the many masks of his desire for a connection to his place. In the Snow Man’s beholding of nothingness, one hears the cry of Robert Frost’s phoebes in “The Need of Being Versed In Country

Things.” The two poems, published within a month or two of each other,23 provide an unlikely overlap from two poets standing at opposite corners of the early twentieth century ideal.

The collision reveals the problem of place and perspective percolating then in the work of American poets, both at home and abroad. As such, the

92 poems expose an anxiety of locale, a furtive wish for the possibility of a familiar place—the domestic American scene—to possess poetic value. Hold Frost’s “One had to be versed in country things/ Not to believe the phoebes wept” against

Stevens’ “One must have a mind of winter/ To regard the frost and the boughs/

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.” The commanding ‘must’ of each poem and its underlying boast of apathy belies the tenderness of the speaker’s connection to his environment. Such a connection must stem, necessarily, from habitational familiarity—a long knowing, a ‘being versed,’ a ‘regarding’ and ‘beholding’—of the place itself. Both Frost and Stevens seek to elevate the significance of their place through intellectual readings of their locale. To do so, both poets contend an emotional distance from the landscape—a country toughness, a wintry mind—as a way to shield themselves, as American poets who stayed home, from charges of reductive regionalism.

Like Frost in “The Need of Being Versed In Country Things,” Stevens offers a world presumably unskewed by a desirous and conflicting vision of home. “The Snow Man” maintains its frigid vision until the end, when the poem’s buried desires and memories—its conflicting interferences of elsewhere, of tropical Key West—at last dissolve the Snow Man into a zen riddle which seems to “resist the intelligence/ Almost successfully.”24 Read, however, with an understanding of Stevens’ confusion of place—his desire for a home, as it conflicts with his theoretical poetics—the Snow Man emerges as another one of

Stevens’ disappearing figures. “Nothing himself,” the listener merges with his environment beyond the point of distinction, both ‘in the snow’ and ‘of it.’ In

93 Harmonium’s second version of this poem, “Anecdote of Men by The Thousand,” the Snow Man joins a panorama of disappearing men, “men of a valley/ Who are that valley” (CP 41).

Stevens’ own intellectual fear of disappearance into an American place is eventually surpassed by his desire for a home. But for some time, his either/or philosophy, his old choice “between excluding things,”25 keeps him zig-zagging between camps as he seeks to avoid either a purely local mode of exploration or a grandly Modernist urbanity. As Williams, Frost, and other American artists grow closer to their place, and Pound, Eliot, and their cohorts, engage Europe with a cosmopolitan vision—Stevens, always the contrarian, seeks out his distinction.

Critics often reward his efforts. Understood simultaneously as the poet influenced by the French and as the man who, as he later would paint it, had

“never been anywhere except Staten Island,”26 Stevens often has it both ways. On the one hand it has been said that his work converges with “the “local” mode so popular among his [American] contemporaries” (Strom 259). On the other, cast as the quintessential American Modernist, he creates a “local, Floridian, version of the modernist primitive”(Jenkins 179). Such criticism, if not naming in explicit terms the slow revelation of place which occurs in Stevens’ oeuvre, at least senses that the poet’s “relationship with region is sometimes a troubled one” (Jenkins

178).

That troubled relationship with his place comes through from the start in the poems of Harmonium, then attempts to reorder itself in poems like “The Well

94 Dressed Man with a Beard” and “Arrival at the Waldorf,” where we find glimmerings of contact between the speaker and his surroundings. Stevens pursues a resolution of the trouble in such later long poems as “Notes Toward a

Supreme Fiction,” which cuts a path into “Auroras of Autumn” and “An

Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Ultimately that work, bolstered by his increasing sense of Connecticut as home, leads Stevens to the sense of connection which emerges from The Rock and later poems.

Through this progression, Stevens’ desire for a home plays interestingly against the poetic modes of his day. His early work, criticized for presenting

“closed worlds,” gives way to later poems which are praised, contrarily, for departing from “that strain of high modernism which privileges the autotelic artwork” (Jenkins 198). That particular development presents a coincidence of his own life and the modernist era for Stevens—when he was homesick, it was during a literary age characterized by dislocation, and when he found his home—in a bristling arc like the one leapt by the bucks and the firecat— regionalism was soon to be reassigned artistic value.

The shift in Stevens’ work is emotive and holistic, the poems tied so closely to his search for a place to belong that a new ars poetica emerges. The change does not necessitate a formal restructuring of the page as it will for

Williams. In fact, Stevens’ late poems follow closely the sounds and shapes of the earlier ones. Poems of The Rock, coming as they do on the heels of the long-poems of Stevens’ mid-career, pose a stylistic return to the petite lyrics of Harmonium.

Often the late work engages in soft candlelight, the harsh beams of those early

95 poems. Their softening of diction and sentiment, and their newfound divulgence of desire, may very well signal the imminent rise of confessionalism (Jenkins

198). And while Stevens’ late work is by no means a photographic mapping of his Connecticut town, there is sufficient transformation to warrant recent criticism which claims that his work begins to forecast a “renewed attention to the local” (Jenkins 198). Although Williams can best be understood as the most visible spearhead of that movement, Stevens, “at the very end of his career,” Lee

Jenkins suggests, “can speak less equivocally as the ‘Voice of America’ when he speaks of his own American region” (198). That he speaks “less equivocally” is the most one can say of Stevens as a regionalist; his location must be measured by degrees.

THE INSOLID BILLOWING OF THE SOLID

The contradictions in Wallace Stevens come down, then, to the paradigm of a man of two minds. “We live in the mind,” Stevens asserts, and titles his poem with great zest and defiance, “Description Without Place.” We find however, that any such metaphor which asserts that the mind is the world must ultimately fail. Take, for example, “Crude Foyer,” (CP 270) where in the midst of

Transport to Summer, the poet in a dour mood tells us that “Thought is false happiness,” though in his very late poem, “Of Mere Being,” a place of contentment appears much nearer.

Naturally, such contradiction has found its way into our criticism. Stevens has been classified and reclassified as we try to make sense of the Modernist

96 canon. On the one hand, Stevens has been called a self-proclaimed poet of place, one of those who “tend[s] to bond quickly and deeply to [his] immediate locales because the contemplating mind engenders the poem by reshaping, with gusto, the particular qualities of available land forms” (Doreski 152). On the other, he has been called an adamant outsider to the American scene.27 And while Frank

Kermode writes that “Stevens’s sense of place is accurate with respect to the imagination only” (79), Eleanor Cook counters by contending that Stevens’ poems offer “simple, accurate, realistic description” (69).

While William Carlos Williams comes to be called the poet “who seeks to show us the world beneath our feet” (Mariani), Stevens works to “make the visible/ a little hard to see” (CP 275). Despite the counterpoint intentions of these two poets bearing different brushes and different tongues, their ideas are closer than either would like to admit. Begrudging Williams his connection to his place,

Stevens sets off to construct a habitat out of poems. “Poetry is a renovation of experience” (CP 914), he writes in his Adagia, that collection of philosophical wishes. It is in his letters where we find the original version of the poet’s dissatisfaction with his surroundings: “The top of a house in the suburbs is about as comfortless a place as there is in the world. It is part of my probation, however, and I shall have to think of it as amusing” (L 86).

While there is a cosmic homelessness inherent in much of Stevens, there is a seismic shift in how it is understood from the earlier works to the late. For a shift of internal and external worlds does after all occur. Harmonium’s early “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (CP 51) allows the self to carry the world: “I was the world in

97 which I walked, and what I saw/ Or heard or felt came not but from myself;/

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” Hoon has not yet ascertained that the trueness and strangeness of the body’s world, while self- sustaining, fails to locate a dwelling place. It is not until Canto IV of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction that the poet reveals baldly his desire for comfort and belonging: “From this the poem springs: that we live in a place/ That is not our own, and much more, not ourselves/ And hard it is in spite of blazoned days”

(CP 332). But if our cosmic homelessness is hard, the poem itself offers us something like grace.

Stevens’ desire for home—that connection to place that kills contradiction and numbs desire for someplace else—which might comfort the humming self, lingers unsaid in the self-contained world where Hoon loiters, “a spirit without a foyer.” Harold Bloom forgets this when he says the Tea at the Palaz is a

“beautiful… exaltation of the will” (64), and forgets the poet’s desire when he names instead a Whitmanian impulse to “celebrate origins” where what is actually revealed is the poet’s desire to locate a place of belonging, beyond the troubled strings of origins.

THERE IS NO PLACE

The early poems of Harmonium boasted a purported bravado—the cold vision of “The Snow Man,” the self-assuredness of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” the meditative decrees of “Sunday Morning.” Ideas of Order and The Man with the

Blue Guitar, on the other hand, flashed their framing arrangements, while the

98 mesmerizations of Parts of a World came at last to glimpse “the transparence of the place in which/ He is and in his poems we find peace.”28 In the broad philosophies of Transport to Summer dawned the knowledge that “The greatest poverty is not to live/ In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire/ Is too difficult to tell from despair.”29 The developments of these volumes prove to be the direct inheritance of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” where the trouble of a scene and its competing dynamisms is understood finally as

…not a choice Between excluding things. It was not a choice

Between, but of. He chose to include the things That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony. (CP 348)

And this realization comes to create the transformative spaces lit by The Auroras of Autumn, where even the lowly serpent will seek a home.

But to arrive at Auroras, one must first witness the breaking open which occurs in “Notes,” the crucial moment when the poet decides to choose “the complicate.” In this revelatory enlargement—the discarding of the either/or—

Stevens chooses to allow a home to emerge from the seeming contradiction of place: “My house has changed a little in the sun,” the poet assesses, “the fragrance of the magnolias comes close,/ False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin” (CP 333). The split vision of The Snow Man is reconciled through this closeness, a tentative closing of the gap between reality and the imagination, between truth and interpretation.

An unlikely harmony for the poet—an amassing of clapboards, memories, whispered stories, dreams of elsewhere, occurs within and without. Here is a

99 poetic born in the relatively narrow confines of Hartford, Connecticut which nevertheless widens more broadly than the Modernist wasteland and its hodgepodge of global art. In the late work, after choosing not between, but of,

Stevens arrives at an American poetic that is at last not far from Whitman’s striking up of a new world in “Starting From Paumanok:”

Starting from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born, Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother; After roaming many lands—lover of populous pavements; Dweller in Mannahatta, my city—or on southern savannas […]

Like Colton’s palmer bound for holy lands, and not unlike Whitman’s great and relatively local voyage, Stevens makes of his long-time Connecticut residence a New World. It is a poetic of home and of life, one which has been censured, but which I think he has earned. “When I speak of the poem,” Stevens wrote late in his life to his daughter’s English professor, “or often when I speak of the poem, in this book, I mean not merely a literary form, but the brightest and most harmonious concept, or order, of life” (Brazeau 290). The choice “between” for Stevens—between home and office and the poetry written on the sidewalks linking those disparate places, between North and South, between home and where the wind has blown him, between tropics and Nor’easter, between garden and bare scene, between Hartford and Key West—no longer suffices. It is not a matter of between, but of all.

As Stevens found harmony between his split occupations—insisting “I’m just a man, not a poet part time, business man the rest”—so he finds an accordance of place. “He is no Jekyll-Hyde,” says Lewis Nichols after interviewing Stevens within the “imposing structure” of the office building of the

100 Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company the year before Stevens’ death.30

Indeed, within his late work, Stevens’ Jekyll-Hyde days seem far behind him as the poems begin to confront at last the wish for a dwelling—and dare to make one there, out of nothing, in the evening air. As Vendler sees it, the poet comes to reconsider his intention “not to betray, in both senses of the word, the contrary oscillations of his spirit” (Words 57). In short, he allows himself to dwell on one side of “this great river”31 in Connecticut. Vendler senses the amassed harmony, finding that Stevens at last achieves “equilibrated fact” in “The River of Rivers in

Connecticut” (Words 72). But it is less an equilibrium than a casting off of counterweight. The pull of elsewhere weakens as the poet sets his roots in his

New England home.

The poet even goes so far as to “betray” those “contrary oscillations of his spirit”— indulging in the splendor of one pole, one place, without the kind of duplicity which occurs in early works like “The Snow Man” or “Farewell to

Florida.” The sufficiency of a single place can be seen in “To An Old Philosopher in Rome” where Stevens allows: “It is a kind of total grandeur at the end/ With every visible thing enlarged and yet/ No more than a bed, a chair[…]” (434).

And this occurs again in “A Quiet Normal Life,” where the poet achieves an actual place, and not just a construction of the mind alone. Fulfilling Bachelard’s function of inhabiting, the house offers a place of reverie from which the poem might rise: “His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not/ In anything that he constructed.” No, the poet says, “It was here.” Negating the early statement in his Adagia: “we live in the mind,” the poet continues with the specifics of this

101 one, unsplintered site: “This was the setting and the time/ Of year. Here in his house and in his room,/ In his chair […]” (CP 443).

In chiming tercets Stevens locates a home which provides a photographic negative to a poem like “The Idea of Order in Key West.” Rather than requiring a maker’s song to frame its place, “A Quiet Normal Life,” in its extraordinary ordinariness, finds the place itself to achieve poetry, so that the “actual candle blazed with artifice” (CP 444). As Connecticut comes at the end of his life to feel like home, Stevens—in a sentiment surprisingly close to that of Williams’ idol,

Sebastian Rasles and his ardent contact with Maine—allows in “Connecticut

Composed:” it is not that I am a native but that I feel like one. The breakthrough, the fulfillment of a longing, laid bare like that, what a final arrival for the ‘enigmatic’ poet of Hartford.

Preceding that essay by five years, Auroras of Autumn is most clear as a hinge moment for Stevens, a transformation, a shedding of a skin. The poem’s refrain “Farewell to an idea…” reminiscing as it does on the poet’s “Farewell to

Florida,” and “The Auroras of Autumn” in many ways reads as an earnest revisioning of that poem. The poet abandons his idealized elsewhere: “Farewell to an idea … A cabin stands,/ Deserted, on a beach” (CP 355) and then, chillingly, the portent of Key West and the poet’s impending emotional desertion of that romanticized elsewhere, offer a ‘complicate,’ an ‘amassing harmony’—

“the ice and fire” through which Connecticut and Florida might be connected:

The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand. He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps

102 And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green, The color of ice and fire and solitude. (CP 356)

After “another wriggling out of the egg”—an originary home departed,

Whitman’s setting off from Paumanok—the shining snake of “The Auroras” locates its place, its “nest, These fields, these hills, these tinted distances.” By

1950, the poem’s snake and its slithering shape which goes “gulping after formlessness” (CP 355) can be understood as the body’s wish to merge with space, a dream of connection to place, though still an obliterative one, as imagined in “Description Without Place.” But the title poem of Auroras marks a transitional space for the poet. Oscillating much as he has done before, the poem moves between erasure and the dream of a warm home where “the mother invites humanity to her house/ And table” (358), and back again to an annihilative place-connection: “He opens the door of his house/ On flames”

(359). A transformative understanding of the significance of the house occurs here. Both transient and settled, the house poses a temporary but crucial structure, one which is both made of and exists within its inhabitants:

The house will crumble and the books will burn. They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time, Together, all together. (CP 357)

“The Auroras of Autumn” shows Stevens as he struggles to achieve

Bachelard’s dream of the integrative house, that is, to show that there exists, beyond the “Snow Man,” an imagination capable of withstanding the conflicting aspects of a place. The seasonal landscapes of Hartford, a recollection of the tropics in the slimy North—to find a home Stevens learns not to forget these

103 opposing landscapes, but to hold them simultaneously without wishing himself away, to achieve a mind not wholly winter but one “which in the midst of summer stops/ To imagine winter” (CP 360). To this end, to adapt to a changing environment, with the arrival of each new season Stevens would rearrange the furniture of his room so that he could always see “at the pleasantest angle.”32

Section VIII wrestles further with those ‘interfering dynamisms’ as

Stevens deflects finally any romanticized notion of origins. “There is never a place,” the poet claims. The assertion, removed as it is from its predicate (“there is never a place [of innocence]), poses an intrepidity greater than it can own, recalling the similar bravado of “Description Without Place.” In that poem, place also bristles with its supposed absence: “Such seemings are the actual ones: the way/ Things looks each day” (CP 297). Here, Stevens seeks out a habit of mind that can, if not offer a substitute for religion, at least create a sense of home:

There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place. Or if there is no time, If it is not a thing of time, nor of place,

Existing in the idea of it, alone, In the sense against calamity, it is not Less real. […] (CP 360-1)

With the assuaging words, “it is not less real,” the poet widely touted as the expert of reality and the imagination, allows for the idea of home, the idea of it alone—independent of time and place—to shiver to the surface as a thing of possibility. The bold remove inherent in the enjambed phrase, “There is no place,” still shields, a little, Stevens’ dream of home.

104 Once arrived at, the new home and its substitutive comforts offer an evocative calm:

… That we partake thereof, Lie down like children in this holiness, As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,

As if the innocent mother sang in the dark Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard, Created the time and place in which we breathed… (CP 361)

The “as if”s allow a return to a sacred place, although, like the speaker of Frost’s

“Road Not Taken,” Stevens is still nagged by daydreams of elsewhere: “As if he lived all lives, that he might know.” From that lament continues, in Stevens’ eyes, the insufficiency of place, the distances from a home “without the strength to sustain,” so that the speaker flashes between visions of geographical experience and longing, between “hall harridan” or “hushful paradise” as the poem collapses, grammatically and existentially, succumbing to “a haggling of wind and weather” (CP 363). Through these wishes and deflations, comes Stevens’ understanding that a place to call home is a place of transformation: “Yesterday it was summer: today it is autumn. The change pervades everything and I suppose, therefore, that a mosaic of a man is something like a mosaic of the weather” (L 612).

After “The Auroras of Autumn” opens the collection with its clashing weather, “Large Red Man Reading” appears, rejoicing in the cold frost of a place, offering the very nexus of existential sensory enjoyment. In it, the Large Red Man cures the Snow Man of his insensateness—bringing “those from the wilderness of stars” back from death, from navel-gazing, from ennui. “Pans above the stove,

105 the pots on the table, the tulips among them”—a basic domestic scene re-infused with the poignancy of living, reanimating those who would have “cried out to feel it again,” those who would have “wept to step barefoot into reality” and

“run fingers over leaves” (CP 365). “Large Red Man Reading” is an overture to the late work where we will begin to discover a poet “who loves this earth and does not want to leave it. Nothing of this passion sounds in the early poems for all their wit and pleasure. And paradoxically, for all their sensuousness” (Cook

313). Because a home here on this earth, Stevens begins to understand, contains shivering sensations too, the aches of weather and the pangs of desire, against which the home fire burns more brightly. Although “summer has always made

[Stevens] happy” (L 760), it is the difficult weather of the “Auroras” which yields the paradisal paradox of “Large Red Man Reading” with its echo of Reading,

Pennsylvania, its hope of delivering up again the lost, cherished world. In this lovely, bitter weather, arrives the necessary angel.

THESE HOUSES, THESE DIFFICULT OBJECTS

From the shifting world of “The Auroras of Autumn,” rise the houses of

“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” These houses are difficult, because, as

Bachelard would have it, the competing ‘dynamisms’ of the houses continue to

‘interfere.’ For Stevens, we have seen that such interference is not merely temporal, but also presents a problematic simultaneity of here and elsewhere—a dream of the tropics in the cold North, the Snow Man’s at once present and absent nothing. Even late in his life, he speaks self-consciously of his domesticity,

106 that his poems hold, or behold, faraway places, “means nothing,” Stevens insists in 1954—less than a year before his death, “I always say I’ve never been anywhere except Staten Island.”33 But in this longer poem, the walking poet explores the town in a way which begins to amass its harmony, prefiguring the coalescing landscape of the poems of The Rock. The streets of New Haven are filtered through experience and desire, not “The eye’s plain version” which, if it exists at all, exists as “a thing apart,/ The vulgate of experience” (CP 397). It is the mind’s eye which produces “the never-ending meditation,” the amassing vision of the world: “an and yet, and yet, and yet—”(CP 397). Through these accompaniments, the streets of New Haven open up their architecture to the walking poet—through Bachelard’s “function of inhabiting” Stevens comes to recognize, within this place which he is coming to comprehend as his home,

“transparent dwellings of the self” (CP 397).

Still, New Haven—close to home, yet not the utterly familiar Hartford of his daily walks—provides the slightest degree of elsewhere which Stevens has come to embrace as an impetus for coming and going, for enabling a departure and return. In this slight travel, then, an epic journey. “There is nothing that gives the feel of Connecticut like coming home to it” he writes in “Connecticut

Composed,” a coming home, he explains, which is “not a question of distance”

(CP 896). And “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” while bespeaking the commonplace, offers “no commuter's idea of New Haven.”34 When Eleanor Cook notes that “Ordinary Evening” presents “a poem of place in the fullest sense of the word,” I believe she means in the “broadest” sense of the word, that is, in the

107 sense of a human being continually adjusting to his environment. Cook also claims the poem holds a “close connection with actual place, with the city of

New Haven” (267), another slight distension. The poem, of course, rises from that actual place—as does “green and actual Guatemala” in “Arrival at the

Waldorf”—from the streets of that unlikely locale. But the work cannot be quite claimed as local writing, for it neither fits Cook’s claims of “simple, accurate, realistic description” (69) nor what Martha Strom calls the “temporary flirtation with the “local” mode so popular among his contemporaries” (259). And the speaker appears more a Modern flâneur than a geographer, when compared with the intimate intrusions of Williams’ Paterson or the topographical dialogues of Frost’s longer poems. Here again Stevens must be measured by degrees. As he makes sense of his own search for cosmic refuge, Stevens, in his way, gets closer to the actuality of Connecticut—he gives the place a name, to start, and it is almost home, almost Hartford. He also begins to shrink the idea of elsewhere to the size of the hand—held like a green leaf brought inside for the winter. The tropical elsewhere is reduced to the palmer’s crossed palm leaves, recalling their sunny source:

Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven Before and after one arrives or, say,

Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark, Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes Or Paris in conversation at a café. (CP 414)

The place of Connecticut is actual, as Cook suggests, but it is lifted to the mythological, pitted against Rome—while the grandeur of Rome and Paris are encapsulated in the small, the mundane. The ‘ordinariness’ of this evening in

108 New Haven holds the same extraordinary ordinariness of “A Quiet Normal Life” in which an “actual candle [blazes] with artifice” (CP 443). And here, as there,

Stevens locates the contradictive language of mere being.

From that arranging mind comes the question “Of what is this house composed,” which rolls forward and does not end—until a section break occurs, by which time the question mark will have shimmered away entirely, a lit match tossed into a roaring fire:

Of what is this house composed if not of the sun,

These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate Appearances of what appearances, Words, lines, not meanings, not communications, […] (CP 397)

The houses of “An Ordinary Evening” stand as the structures Stevens has dreamt of for himself since his homesickness began in New York a good lifetime earlier. Their wooden frames, combustible, burn down to “words, lines” without meaning—structures of necessity which in their actuality burn with artifice35.

In these houses, always places of curiosity and wish for Stevens, the poet dreams an ultimate reverie of place. The poet begins to realize a connection with his surroundings which is no longer obliterative, but expansive, an extension of self:

Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves, So that they become an impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound,

Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self (CP 397)

In his dwelling place in Connecticut, filled as it is with individual dwellings— each with its mystery of habit and architecture, haunted by white nightgowns—

109 Stevens makes a home of these many homes. The town bell’s swinging clapper, like the never-ending meditation, strikes out, comes up against the soundbow of the bell itself, makes music in the place where it lives.

The earth is not a building but a body, the poet had written in his Adagia. In

“An Ordinary Evening” the houses grow out from the body, its invisible connections to its place, its desires. Lacking the ability to move in and out of inhabitants’ homes, as Williams was wont to do as a doctor making house calls,

Stevens must fantasize the interiors to overcome the blind spot in his vision of his world: “dilapidate/ Appearances of what appearances.” Neighbor Florence

Berkman tells the story of the poet’s obsession with the imagined domestic world:

I used to walk up and down Terry Road with our cocker spaniel; he wouldn’t even look at me, wouldn’t even talk to me. But he always talked to my husband: he used to work outdoors on Saturday and Sunday; Stevens would be going to the park. But one morning it was pouring. I drove out to the corner, and here was Wallace Stevens standing, absolutely sopping. I didn’t know whether or not to stop because he never acknowledged [my] being on this earth. But I did stop, and I said, "Mr. Stevens, would you like a ride?" He said, "Oh, I’d love it." He got in the car, and I thought I’d be very proper. "Mr. Stevens, I don’t believe you know who I am. I’m Florence Berkman." He said, "I know who you are. You live in that little house. I’ve often thought I’d love to see the inside of your house." (Brazeau 239)

The man who might have loved to enter the interior of the Berkmans’ house, cross the threshold of a home’s door, throw a log on the fire, finds the abodes lining the streets of New Haven to be constructed by “impoverished architects” when compared to the grand structures of faith and imagination. Rather than imagine these greater structures as the “fancied towers of London,” like those

110 dreamt of by children in his turn-of-the-century New York, Stevens allows desire and multitudinous vision to complicate, but not utterly fragment the scene.

Where once those “Sweet songs with longing weighted” dreamt, incongruously, of “fancied towers/ Of London” (L 40) here such longing exposes the gap between dilapidated and inspired buildings: “In the presence of such chapels and such schools,/ The impoverished architects appear to be/ Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive” (CP 400). In this gap we interject, on Stevens’ behalf, his unasked question: why shouldn’t our homes approach the art of a god’s imagined house, whether that of the chapel’s god of faith or the school’s god of knowledge? But it is a question Large Red Man has already asked, and again

Stevens answers the question with the extraordinariness of the ordinary: “the spectator also moves/ With lesser things, with things exteriorized/ Out of rigid realists” (CP 401). As the commonplace and the miraculous approach each other,

“that which was incredible becomes,/ In misted contours, credible day again”

(CP 401).

Longing, as it transforms in Stevens’ late work, comes closer to the actual than it has before, moving from the broad ‘form’ to the particular, if multiple, fragrances and leaves of the place:

We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form. We descend to the street and inhale a health of air To our sepulchral hollows. Love of the real Is soft in three-four cornered fragrances From five-six cornered leaves […] (CP 401)

The epiphany of “Notes,” that the choice is “of” not of “between,” allows the poet to reproduce the multiple truths of the layered world, the “three-four

111 cornered fragrances,” and the contradiction of its multiple precisions and inexact designs, its “five-six cornered leaves.” “Amassed,” the poem will venture, “in a total double-thing” (CP 402). The poem moves toward understanding place as a connective environment, for better or worse, “In the end, in the whole psychology,” the poet relents, “the self,/ The town, the weather” all mix together in “a casual litter” (CP 404).

The relative ‘litter’ of Stevens’ slightly longer poems allow for moments of clarity often suppressed in the earlier lyrics of his oeuvre. Here, the poet says, simply: “The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:/ The instinct for earth, for

New Haven, for his room” (CP 406). The vague rooms of the early work, the desire for place, for the world, come into relief in Stevens’ rendering of this small city. The house, and its accoutrements, offers the space of fueling dynamisms of which Bachelard warned:

It is the window that makes it difficult To say good-by to the past and to live and to be In the present state of things as, say, to paint

In the present state of painting and not the state Of thirty years ago. It is looking out Of the window and walking in the street and seeing [… ](CP 408)

Here the poem plays the role of daydream, acting as “binding principle” as past and present complicate the place of residence,36 so that Stevens searches for a reconciliation of place, easing the strain of then and now, distant and near:

“The two romanzas,” he writes, “the distant and the near,/ Are a single voice in the boo-ha of the wind” (CP 410).

112 In “An Ordinary Evening” Stevens begins to confront the spatial and chronological elements of home which have haunted, and often fractured, his early work. Writing at last from a place where he feels at home, such conflicts grow less threatening. From his new haven in Connecticut—where it is raining at the moment—Stevens turns his back on that deserted cabin in the Florida Keys.

But his landscape still bristles with the indelible marks of those other places.

A DWELLING IN THE EVENING AIR

From the early point of deceit marked by “The Snow Man,” the development of Stevens’ desirous reverie catapults across his oeuvre toward the uncharacteristic union attained in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”

This later poem of The Rock offers an indulgence of desire for place which will yield, ultimately, the burning meditation of an intense physical connection with one’s space brought forth by “The Palm at the End of the Mind.” But before it does, “Final Soliloquy” acts as a first and conversely, late, possibility of place for the poet who has been focused on the earth, and who, elsewhere, has helped those who “would have wept to step barefoot into reality,/ / That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost/ And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves/ And against the most coiled thorn....” But the poet of “Large Red Man Reading” is an artist at work. “Final Soliloquy of the Interior

Paramour,” by contrast, reveals a moment of intense self-intimacy for this poet who has often veiled his ordinary desire within enigmatic paradigms.

113 The intimacy of “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” is set forth in the opening stanza, which calls us into the warm, lighted room. The poem lacks the language of architecture—no walls, doorframes, roof—but the rendezvous occurs in this unnamed place in which the language of the poem—its metaphors—takes the shape of the room. This room and its light—the paradoxical “first light of evening,” a counterforce to Sunday Morning’s

“downward to darkness”—repels darkness:

Light the first light of evening In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, A light, a power, the miraculous influence. (CP 444)

The “we” of the poem, read, as Vendler suggests, as “I,” tells Stevens’ most intimate story, the reality he would cry to enter again, the reality of the body protected by its habitat, in front of the fire, with the radio on. In this reality, the poet allows the unlikely ‘goodness’ of the first stanza to emerge. “Out of all the indifferences,” the unimportant differences, the poem allows at last the body to find solace in its prickling senses: “A light, a power, the miraculous influence.”

For Stevens, arriving at “one thing”—these differences unified—is an achievement which joyfully abandons the formerly fragmented universe and its shock of incongruities. The poet finally seeks self-collection, a gathering up of the disparate reveries. The Snow Man’s split vision of nothing, both present and

114 absent, is reconciled as the poet connects with his place. In “Description Without

Place” the poet dreamt of a powerful bodily pushback that might quash his humming connection to his environment, but in this late poem we find instead a gentle yielding, a peaceful intermingling:

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough. (CP 444)

This grand achievement for Stevens is a confluence of mental and physical space: the difficult art of feeling at home. The poem’s daydream succeeds as Bachelard’s

“binding principle.” As the poet moves into the wholeness of existing, a precursor to “Of Mere Being,” the act of being and dreaming creates its own living space. As envisioned in his early translation of du Bellay, here the language itself is an act of transcendent creation from which emerges the miraculous “dwelling in the evening air.” The dwelling—both a majestic creation and a little house—protect the true beloved, the homesick self, who has spent a lifetime wishing for the refuge of a unified home. That is, a home not split by the desire for elsewhere, not ruptured by the contradiction of Stevens’ sundered sense of place.

115 In the poem’s creation of home and joyous sufficiency, “Final Soliloquy” is a merging of poetry with life, the lamp and the mind both “of this same light.”

Not the harsh reality of early Stevens where the ‘lamp affixes its beam.’ And it is when read against that poem, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” that “Final

Soliloquy” appears most revolutionary. At its fullest, “Final Soliloquy of the

Interior Paramour” offers an antidote to “Emperor.” Here the gentle, tender light of “Final Soliloquy” supplants the earlier poem’s harsh lamp. Here the shawl protects and warms as opposed to “Emperor’s” useless sheet. Here “be” at last attains its “finale of seem.” As a counterpoint to “Emperor,” “Final Soliloquy” moves toward that substitute for religion of which Stevens dreamed: God and the imagination are one through the engendering language act, “We say.” In this act, towards the end of his career, Stevens discovers his raison d’être: “I write poetry because it is part of my piety: because for me it is the good of life.” (L 473).

And in this piety, earned in “Final Soliloquy,” he realizes that home occurs where poetry and life fuse: “When I speak of the poem…I mean not merely a literary form, but the brightest and most harmonious concept, or order, of life”

(qtd. by Vendler 5). This small, important poem—and its impossible dwelling— holds Stevens’ epiphany, the home for which the early work pined.

The idea that “Final Soliloquy” may be read as life—as the design by which we create our dwelling out of air, which is to say, here, and here, and here—and that it may be read as a mantra of place, offers an unusual tenderness to readers of Stevens. And although the poet had it in mind to create a long poem from this subject, “Final Soliloquy” made a short song. The poet got hung up, he

116 says, able to get “no farther than the statement that God and the imagination are one.”37 Instead of length, the poem takes on a kind of circularity, the lines wrapping around to build a nest. In fact, the first and third lines—“Light the first light of evening” and “The world imagined is the ultimate good”—become reworked throughout the last lines of each stanza, as though Stevens has adapted the villanelle form to shape the paramour’s meditation.

Read this way—heretically, yes—as a villanelle, the poem’s final stanza begins with what might be two lines of the villanelle’s closing envoy: “out of this same light,” and the poem’s first anaphora: “out of the central mind.” In reading the next two lines of the poem then, as a reconstruction of the first and third, the villanelle’s accomplishment of a final bringing-together comes true in both form and subject, where be, at last, becomes the finale of seem: “We make a dwelling in the evening air” acts as the fulfillment of the poem’s first act of lighting the light, and “In which being there together is enough,” is a resulting sufficiency of the imagined world. In this way the poem is a departure from the external ordering of “Idea of Order at Key West”—in which the maker’s “Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred” organize the place itself—and a fulfillment of the dream of “Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination,” that of “An argentine abstraction approaching form” (C 472). It comes down, at last, to a dwelling in the evening air, Stevens’ sense of home, the emerging form after which he longingly flings himself.

A MINOR HOUSE

117 Not often in Stevens’ oeuvre does the imagined world achieve uncomplicated sufficiency, achieve “the amassing harmony” foretold by

“Notes,” nor does his poetic structure so closely reinvent a traditional form, as it does in “Final Soliloquy.” Stevens’ physical wish for a home, and the increasing possibility of belonging, begin to take clearest form in these late poems which appear in The Rock, beyond the rough draft of home posed by “Notes Toward A

Supreme Fiction.”

Late in his career, “Final Soliloquy” is a rare moment of homecoming for the poet for whom comfort has so often been splintered by a split-vision of place and longing. Capable of envisioning a sufficiency in 1950, Stevens, just six years prior, had complained that

In the autumn I badly need my mother, or something. This has always been the toughest time of the year for me: I want to migrate; I want to give the office a kick in the slats. The last two weekends I have spent potting things up and bringing them indoors so that the room in which I sit in the evening now looks like a begonia farm.38 (473-4)

When faced with a move from the leafy summer into a closed interior space,

Stevens carries the leaves inside. He is the palmer carrying home a symbol of life from his pilgrimage. While Stevens’ wish ‘to migrate’ still consumes him in the mid-1940s, after World War II he comes, through “Final Soliloquy,” to dream of a place to call home and a way to belong there. From the protected home, through a reverie of place—Bachelard’s function of inhabiting—emerges a dwelling place for the poet, who, so moved by this short lyric himself, sees it conclude the edition of his selected poems published in 1953.39

118 Reinspected in the light of Stevens’ developmental domestic celebration,

The Rock is filled with poems that determine at last ways to make a home from the pieces, poems that find ways to survive the winter. These are poems which hold in one hand a memory of a place of warmth, and in the other, the actuality of the New England landscape, and do so without collapsing into the enigmatic disappearance of the split figures of Harmonium. There, the snow man froze, the bucks clattered, the horny feet protruded. Here, the poet carries inside his potted plants, a twentieth century palmer, lighting the light. By 1952, Stevens seems to have reconciled—amassing harmony—the polar split which marked his own search for refuge. When Richard Wilbur sent a note to the poet in 1952, sharing an idea of Bachelard’s, “ that the human imagination simply cannot cope with polar conditions,” the poet responded with what Wilbur recalls as “some splendid sentence about Bachelard [being] wrong, [that] most art is created out of a condition of winter” (Brazeau 169-70). "In “The Plain Sense of Things,” the world’s winter transformation first reveals a diminishment:

The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. (CP 428)

But as Stevens witnesses the diminishment of the green landscape, that which gave the body comfort and afforded the mind a leafy oasis, the poet locates, still, in the reductive scene, a greatness:

Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

119 The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires. (CP 428)

In that bare unadorned pond comes the layering of dynamisms, the complicated, the amassing harmony. The “withs” and “withouts” finally collapse together into one image: “without reflections, leaves,/ Mud, water like dirty glass.” The memories of the pond in its varying seasons, “plain” vision of the pond now, all merge into the greatness that comes with a deep and four-seasonal familiarity of place. Not quite the didactic refrain of Frost’s Oven-Bird, Stevens’ great reduction, in resolution of contradiction, is the same greatness which exists in the common not always pleasant world the Large Red Man returns to us. It is the greatness, finally, of a Yankee who has, like Frost, found his home, reforged his childhood playhouse. In “Connecticut Composed,” written just months before his death, Stevens allows himself the refuge he has espoused:

The man who loves New England and particularly the spare region of Connecticut loves it precisely because of the spare colors, the thin lights, the delicacy and slightness of the beauty of the place. The dry grass on the thin surfaces would soon change to a lime-like green and later to an emerald brilliant in a sunlight never too full. When the spring was at its height we should have water-color not an oil and we should all feel that we have had a hand in the painting of it, if only in choosing to live there where it existed. (CP 895)

In this wintry landscape of thin spareness, a watercolor not an oil, Stevens locates his nativity. At last homesick longing gives way to the empowerment of locating himself in the world, an intensity of connection Stevens came to recognize:

120 “…what I had in mind when I spoke of the coming home that gives one the feel of Connecticut. What I had in mind was something deeper that nothing can ever change or remove” (CP 896).

LOCATING THE PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND

“Of Mere Being” The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down. (CP 476-7)

I have a photo album filled with snapshots of the palm at the end of the mind, having tried to locate in Key West the precise palm which rises in Stevens’

“Of Mere Being.” But the “being” of the poem removes the potential for locating this tree through photographic means, through imagery. The reader needs to go there, to the palm, sit beneath it in absolute repose in a sweltering hemispheric heat. Find a way to both merely be—which is a form of vacation, an escape from

‘human meaning and feeling’—and to be most purely—an accessing of this place beyond place, which quells the frantic interpretation of the mind which never rests. I think I found my palm in the sands on Sunset Key.

121 By domicile a New Englander myself, I now go there in poetic reverie as the poem instructs—in lieu of actual going, for, as Stevens knew well, it is not at all times possible to be in the place we desire. But having been there, one knows that the place inscribes itself on the senses, a body carries away the touch of warmth, the rustle of the breeze, and brings back that elsewhere to the cold

North. For Stevens, connection to his new Connecticut home meant something in the air itself, the invisible life of the place. As José Rodríguez Feo remembered,

Stevens was drawn to the South, not “to get away from the cold,” but because of the physical experience of the place: “The climate, nature, the sky, the natural aspect” (Brazeau 141). Stevens’ love of Florida was something, as Feo says, “he felt in the skin.” There he felt an undeniable connection to place, a similar connection he must work long and hard to attain in his sparely colored

Connecticut. Stevens told Feo that in the tropics, “you live with your senses more than when you live in a cold place” (Brazeau 141).

“Of Mere Being” creates a dwelling out of the sensual air of the South—a tropical vacation when considered against the dwelling formed from the premise that “God and the imagination are one” (CP 444) in “Final Soliloquy.” In that poem, the place of dwelling is a “a single shawl/ Wrapped tightly round us” because “we are poor” (CP 444). But beneath the palm rising in “Of Mere Being,” the setting is warm—here is found the vaguely gaudy “bronze decor” of a

Floridian hotel, the gentle breeze, the song of the “fire-fangled” bird. From

Stevens’ adoptive home in Connecticut, the poem presents another case where the poet has come to ‘betray the contrary oscillations of the spirit’ as he dares to

122 dwell in one pole. The Southern hemisphere no longer fragments Stevens’ sense of the world, the warm climes don’t threaten to pull him out of the cold North— in “Of Mere Being” he finds at last that one’s mind need not be wholly winter

“To behold the junipers shagged with ice” (CP 8). The place, inscribed with a vision of elsewhere need not be reduced to an enigmatic riddle. What the poet noted in “An Ordinary Evening,” that “the two romanzas, the distant and the near,/ Are a single voice in the boo-ha of the wind” (CP 410)—is true for him here as well as when he dwells in both the sultry air of Florida and the crisp climate of his New England home.

Overlooking Stevens’ lifelong quest to dwell contentedly someplace—his slow journey home—many critics have mistaken “Of Mere Being” as an

“anagogic metaphor” (312), a poem of the afterlife.40 Positioned as it is, just before the great silence of his death, it is tempting to understand it as such. But the poem’s quality of immortality, the sense of the place itself going on, is one of the earth—the palm rising, the hotels receiving guests, the birds’ endless song. In

Stevens’ last scene, the world’s immortal figures stand in their present-tense verbs, continuing on:

The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. (CP 477)

“Beyond the last thought,” the poem, then, allows for the mystical nature of the place itself. For understanding “Of Mere Being” as a final return to a once dearly-held paradise on earth, rather than a mystical departure to the shimmering afterlife, makes incarnate earth’s necessary angel. The poem and its

123 Herculean effort of place-making remarkably calls to mind Carl Jung: “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”41 Stevens’ whole title is there, but Jung wrote these words years after Stevens’ poem appeared. The seemingly strange overlap emphasizes the way that Stevens’ philosophy, his “inescapable psychology” in seeking out a home, has yielded to the poetic act of creation, has discovered in the mid-twentieth-century, a regenerative act of place.

If “Of Mere Being” is a farewell poem, it is the poet’s true “Farewell to

Florida” as he accepts fully his Connecticut habitat, allowing the tropical scene to go on without him.42 Vendler goes so far as to rename this poem “Domination of

Gold” (Words 67), “Domination of Black”’s late counterpart. As such, the poem reveals beautifully the conclusion of Stevens’ quest to find in Hartford a place that feels like home, as once and for all he abandons the Floridian landscape without sadness—in the rustling of its endless palms, the place goes on. Cook comes close to the significance of this poem as Stevens’ final turning away from the longings for elsewhere, his unseen arrival home, when she finds in its bronze spaces “no language of upwardness and no language of home” (312). In its tropical scene lies a great dwelling place, but not a main residence.

The palm at the end of the mind stands as an imprint of the world on the spirit, as Stevens would have it. The spirit, finding its foyer in Hartford, conjures up an elsewhere he once longed to inhabit. Helen Vendler offers a beautiful account of the poem as a “place of desire,43” but here as elsewhere her concern privileges desire over place. She is wrong to say the poem presents another battle

124 between “the claims of sensual desire against the reasoning mind” (Words 42).

For this palm rises beyond the fields of that battle.44 The bird’s “foreign song” goes untranslated, “without human meaning,/ Without human feeling” (476).

Stevens offers us the escape he has earned, the ‘blazoned days within the hard life,’ the vacation spent on the sand.

And where Vendler finds a world of “higher” or “theoretical” senses of eye and ear, she misses the “lower” senses of taste and touch that ride in on the invisible sea air and the skin against the soft grit of the implied sand (Words 42), the tropical air which Stevens “felt in the skin” (Brazeau 141). A beach poem— not Stevens’ sudden turning away from earth to heaven—the place’s

“miniaturization” is no miniaturization at all, by which I don’t mean to imply that the poem is the aggrandizement which Vendler finds as the converse result of miniaturization. Rather, the scene contains as much as the human senses can take in. Not miniature, but the precise size of our experience.

By the year of his death in 1955, the poet had found a home in the world, in Hartford. Hartford, the place of cold witness to nothingness as presented in

“The Snow Man.” Hartford, the place Stevens in his letters finds cold beyond metaphor, an “inimical atmosphere,” a Puritan place with a taste for “squash pie and pumpkin pie,” a place where “the less one says about chocolate whipped cream the better45” (L 385). Stevens’ Hartford offers a polar world as opposed to the fiery senses that prickle in “Of Mere Being,” but at last it is Hartford which provides the restless man his sense of home.

125 Rather than offering an analogue or model of the broken pieces, such as those shards offered by The Waste Land, Stevens’ wish for wholeness, like Frost’s, holds a candle against the dark. Once Stevens admits himself into the home he has found in Connecticut, he finally allows: “It is not that I am a native but that I feel like one” (895). “Be” attains its “finale of seem.” In this long-sought and newfound nativity, the poet locates his home. Without the split vision of “The

Snow Man,” his Connecticut becomes a here that can contain a thought of elsewhere without dissolving. The palm leaves rustle from the rose garden at

Elizabeth Park. He chose to include the things/ That in each other are included.

Wallace Stevens, unlikely palmer marked by leaves carried between places, returns home, enters at last the absolute foyer.

126 Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Orig. La poetique de l’espace,

1958. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Berger, Charles. Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Madison: U of

Wisconsin P, 1985.

Bloom, Harold. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New

Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. 1st ed. 1977. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell UP, 1980.

Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens remembered: an oral biography.

San Francisco: North Point P, 1985.

Cook, Eleanor. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 2009.

Davis, Alex and Lee M. Jenkins, ed. “Introduction: Locating modernisms: an

overview.” Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and

American Modernist Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Doreski, William. “Wallace Stevens in Connecticut.” Twentieth Century Literature,

Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 152-165.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Snow Storm.” The Oxford Book of American Poetry.

David Lehman and John Brehm, Eds. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. 32.

Filreis, Alan. Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary

Radicalism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Frankenburg, Lloyd. “Review: The Auroras of Autumn.” The New York Times Books:

127 September 10, 1950.

Frost, Robert. Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. New York: Library of

America, 1995.

Jenkins, Lee M. “Wallace Stevens and America.” Davis, Alex and Lee M. Jenkins.

Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American

Modernist Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Kermode, Frank. Continuities. New York: Random House, 1968.

Lombardi, Thomas F. Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone: The Influence

of Origins on his Life and Poetry. Cranford, NJ: Associated UP, 1996.

Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford

UP, 1991.

Miller, J. Hillis. “Wallace Stevens.” 217-284. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century

Writers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1965.

Nichols, Lewis. “Talk with Mr. Stevens.” The New York Times Books. October 3,

1953.

Perloff, Marjorie. “The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of Modernist Lyric.” Pp.

41- 64 (see pp. 48-49). Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Ed. Albert

Gelpi. New York: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Early Years: 1879-1923. New York: Beech

Tree Books, 1986.

---. Wallace Stevens: The Later Years: 1923-1955. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988.

Strom, Martha. “Wallace Stevens’ Revisions of Crispin’s Journal: A Reaction

Against the “Local.” American Literature, Vol. 54, No. 2 (May, 1982), pp 258-

128 276. Duke University Press.

Stevens, Holly. Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens. New York:

Knopf, 1977.

Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry & Prose. New York: Library of America, 1997.

---. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.

---. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Random,

1942.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969.

Vendler, Helen. Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984.

Whittier, John Greenleaf. Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl. Boston: Ticknor and Fields,

1868.

Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. 1st ed. 1946. New York: New Directions, 1995.

129

Notes

1 As defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Also see entry for “palmer” in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A pilgrim, esp. one returned from the Holy Land (traditionally carrying a palm branch or palm leaf as a mark of his or her pilgrimage).” 2 “The Return,” appears in Colton’s collection Harps Hung Up in Babylon (New York: Henry Holt; 1907). 3 Colton’s influence appears elsewhere in Stevens’ work. “The House,” a poem from the collection Stevens references above (Harps Hung Up in Babylon) carries an echo of the concluding language of “Sunday Morning.” The final lines of Colton’s “The House” conclude: “There shall my day to evening creep,/ Though downward, yet, as rivers sweep/ By winding ways to the great deep.” Compare to the final lines of “Sunday Morning”: At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make/ Ambiguous undulations as they sink,/ Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” In each poem, the house provides a shelter—a complacency— against the motion of river-like time. 4 The ironically named “Carnet de Voyage” [Travel Journal] would be published in 1914, but it was formed from some poems first written in the “Little June Book” that Stevens had made as a birthday gift for Elsie in 1909. See Footnote in Letters, page 139. 5 From his journal entry of December 5th, 1906, when he resided in Fordham Heights, N.Y. 6 From his journal entry dated July 4, 1900. 7 From his journal entry dated June 15, 1900. 8 From his journal entry dated July 4, 1900; this comment was preceded by the more complementary, and contradictory, words: “A city is a splendid place for thinking.” 9 From his journal entry dated August 3, 1900. 10 From his journal entry dated March 11, 1901. 11 Stevens does, however, save the poem, with some changes, in his ‘red folder.’ See editor’s note, Letters page 109. 12 Saved us from the likes of Percy Hutchison’s August 9, 1931 review of Harmonium where he wrote: “From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion. The volume is a glittering edifice of icicles. Brilliant as the moon, the book is equally dead.” Hutchison can’t be blamed for his vision—Stevens worked to bury his emotive relationship with place early on. 13 James Longenbach writes that “When Stevens bought his home in 1932, he explained to a business associate that it was the best thing he had ever done.” For more on Stevens’ esteem of home ownership, see Longenbach’s chapter, “Paris and the Florida Land Boom,” particularly “The Second Silence” Part III, (pp. 120- 132) from his Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. For how Stevens’ sense of safety was impacted by real or imagined threats to home owners during the Great Depression, see Alan Filreis’ chapter “The Poet

130 and the Depression, Part 3: A Dirty House in A Gutted World” (particularly pages 81-88) in his Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. 14 From “Inviting a Friend to Supper.” Also consider Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” in its demonstration of house-desire. 15 To Elsie, Stevens writes first of business, then slips in the news of his fishing trips and recreational activities. See letters to his wife in Letters, “Preliminary Minutiae” (224-237). 16 See Stephen Dunn’s poem “Radical” in the Spring 1993 volume of the Mid- American Review. 17 Although missing from poetic criticism, James Longenbach has tracked it beautifully biographically. See his chapter in Wallace Stevens on “Paris and the Florida Land Boom” for how the expatriation of the literary scene to Europe impacted Stevens, namely how he seeks to quell his restlessness by procuring long lists of items from friends abroad. 18 Lombardi, 205. 19 Lionel Trilling “A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode,” Partisan Review 26, No 3 (Summer 1959): 450-1. 20 See Harold Bloom’s Poetry and Repression page 268 for more on how Bloom sees Stevens’ limitations in ‘questing beyond’ the Transcendental. 21 “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” — this late poem presents a late and rare achievement of the union of self and environment in Stevens’ oeuvre, a moment when the poet at last reveals his fantasy of finding contentment in a dwelling-place. 22 While it has been suggested that “Anecdote” presents a critique of Williams, it deserves noting that the poet returns to the idea of the connection between person and place without irony, particularly “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” section XII: “In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,/ The town, the weather, in a casual litter,/ Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.” (CP 404) 23 Printed in Stevens’ Harmonium (September 1923) and Frost’s New Hampshire (November 1923), respectively. 24 “Man Carrying Thing” 25 “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction,” CP, pp. 348. 26 Ibid. 27 In the essay “Wallace Stevens’ Revisions of Crispin’s Journal: A Reaction Against the “Local,” Martha Strom states that Stevens “left behind his involvement with what current discussion called ‘the local,’” and abandoned any connection of “ ‘place’ to poetry” (259). She places the terms local and place in quotation. 28 “Asides on the Oboe” CP pp. 226-7. 29 Esthetique du Mal CP pp. 286. 30 “Talk with Mr. Stevens” by Lewis Nichols printed October 3, 1954 in The New York Times.

131

31 “The River of Rivers in Connecticut” (CP 451): “There is a great river this side of Stygia.” 32 In the Southern Review, [“Bits of Remembered Time,” 7 n.s. 3 (1971): 654] Holly Stevens writes “My father’s bedroom and private bath were at the top of the front stairs facing the garden. He rearranged his furniture with the seasons, so that he could lie in bed and look out at the pleasantest angle.” 33 Ibid. 34 Lloyd Frankenburg’s comment on the poem, from his review of The Auroras of Autumn, printed in The New York Times, September 10, 1950. 35 See again “A Quiet, Normal Life” (CP 443-444). 36 A similar troubling coalescence occurs in “Local Objects” where the poet writes “a remembered past, a present past,/ Or a present future, hoped for in present hope” (CP 473)—the confusion, in other words, of the “dynamisms” (Bachelard 6) of a place. 37 Stevens shares his plans for the piece with Joseph Bennett in a letter dated December 8, 1950. 38 From letter to Emma Stevens Jobbins dated September 12, 1944. 39 Selected Poems published by Faber and Faber; 1953. For more on Stevens’ decision to include it in Selected, see Letters, 733. 40 See for example Charles Berger’s reading of this poem (in his Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens) which makes of the palm a final holy grail, what Berger says results in Blake’s philosophical question: “who made thee, who formed thy symmetry?” Eleanor Cook, on the other hand, shifts the discussion of the afterlife regarding this poem towards an immortality of song. 41 See Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1962. 42 Such a departure was envisioned wistfully in “The Auroras of Autumn” where the poet said “farewell to an idea” and looked back longingly to where “a cabin stands,/ Deserted, on a beach” (CP 355). See pages 35-6 of this essay. 43 See her reading of the poem in Words of Desire, pp. 41-2 44 In terms of desire, Eleanor Cook comes close to redirecting Vendler’s argument in 2009. Claiming Stevens’ place poems allow an outlet for his repressed sexuality, she also mistakenly maps romantic love into the scene. She gets close to the condition of his desire here: “Stevens’ accessible love poems are not written to a woman but to a state, to Florida. […] He maps the seductive landscape of Florida like a lover mapping a woman’s body” (53). 45 Letter to Wilson Taylor dated January 13, 1941 regarding a baker in New Jersey about whom Stevens exclaims “That man in Plainfield is some pastrician!” (L 385).

132 THE DOOR OPENS:

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND THE MODERN AMERICAN HOME

-Chapter 3-

STAYING HOME

If you don’t think that place is important go ahead and shove it into the mouth of the moon. So wrote William Carlos Williams in his 1943 essay

“Axioms” (Recognizable 175), leaving little question as to why he has been termed

“Aggressively American” (Perloff “Living” 252). But Williams had toiled a good many years to reach just this declaration—years of self-doubt—about his artistic predicament, angst over the expatriation of so many of his good literary companions, an increasingly overwhelming medical practice tying him to

Rutherford, New Jersey with little time to write—have preceded this kiss off.

When he pecks out the epithet before the end of WWII, he is furious at the ‘dead’ art the critics are continuing to extol, the continuing impact of Eliot’s sorely placeless Waste Land, the shadow of Stevens’ forthcoming, shameless

“Description Without Place” to which we know Williams famously retorts “A

Place, Any Place, to Transcend All Places.” In it he moans “Poor / Hoboken.

Poor sad / Eliot. Poor memory” (Collected Poems Vol. I 165)—lamenting the loss of place, the loss of names, the loss of words which themselves are tied inextricably to a place (he’ll later write that his painter friend Marsden Hartley is more than a New Englander, he’s a Mainer, meaning names like “the Kennebec and the Penobscot” were words expressed not just through vocabulary but

133 through an inhabitant’s thoughts, shaping how he sees the world) (Recognizable

155). But the philosophical and often defensive exercise of promoting a kind of regionalism will transform into a truly profound connection to place for

Williams, one made more solid by its poetic rendering and by his “house- calling.” Through these modes of contact, the poet-doctor comes to commune with his world.

The poet’s homage to place culminates of course in Paterson, a poem that digs out the names of its own common thoughts, that lifts its dead bodies from the river. By the time Williams gets to it we can see how his earlier, and at times concurrent, lyric work prefigures ways the poet-doctor will complicate notions of home and place in the Modernist landscape: “Sorrow is my own yard,” goes the

“Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” as Williams reverses symbol and personal predicament, the speaker claiming her place, emotionally, physically, against the conventional expectations of bloom, the famous contrast of life against death that

Williams is known for, set, pointedly, in its domestic scene (Collected Poems Vol. II

171).

While his peers seek an imagined universal, Williams is working against the grain to create a poetic founded in a place and its residents, in other words working, as Paul Mariani suggests in a biography that seeks to place Williams in the depths and details of his world, “to make his audience see the world under its very feet” (New World Naked 417). Williams’ attention to his American home, his unwillingness to budge, bearing even his European artistic influence— works to relocate American language from the floating waste land that seeps into much

134 American-abroad poetry written in the period between the two world wars, to the immediate reality of Williams’s busted door swinging on its hinges—a door grounded in a specific place, not any place, but specifically his perch in New

Jersey through which is defined a notion of home that includes a widening circle of interiors, thresholds, and exteriors, of self and of houses, of streets, neighborhoods, the great and defeating cliffs and water of Paterson Falls, the skyline, the river running to the sea, the rain that returns to us the river.

The intersection of place and art, the way a notion of home touches the artist’s life, grows increasingly vital for Williams: “This was my river and I was going to use it,” he says of the Passaic and of his plans for the poem Paterson, “I had grown up on its banks, seen the filth that polluted it, even dead horses” (I

Wanted 73). The filth of the river, the failed dream of harnessing its force for electrical power, the poor that live along its banks, Sam Patch and his ultimately fatal quest to jump the falls, equestrian ghosts—this is the place that Williams comes to love and call, in spite of itself, home:

The place sweats of staleness and of rot a back-house stench . a library stench

It is summer! stinking summer

Escape from it—but not by running away. Not by “composition.” Embrace the foulness (Paterson Book 2; 103)

In working to ‘embrace the foulness,’ and hence escape the ‘library stench,’ the rot, in other words, of book learning, which overstudies its art and absents itself from the lived spaces of the world—in his segment on Williams in the American

135 Poetry Review, Mark Rudman says there was ‘nothing arty about the man but his art’—Williams understands, too, the significance of critical work that endeavors to place the artist in his world (53). A vital undertaking, this means understanding the inextricable correlation of art and environment—and it is through this sense of that undertaking that I begin.

To see how he has sought time and again to examine the role of locale on artistic construction, look how he celebrates Marsden Hartley’s repatriation to

Maine: “his decision to quit Europe for America was a fully conscious one, bred of a powerful conviction that here, more than anywhere else, that reward which he sought was to be found” (Recognizable 154). Williams liked to think he was responsible for a change in the tide, as these expatriates, these “runners-away”

(Recognizable 138) as Williams would coyly re-term them, began to reevaluate their place in the world—attributing Hartley’s return, in part, to his own improvisational homage to America, In the American Grain. Still, Williams remains on the defensive as he writes of Hartley: “It is to be emphasized that he was not an uninformed man but had lived in the very vortex of the art life of the period and had looked and seen what the world offered before he rejected it”

(Recognizable 154).

After a full three decades of his friends’ expatriation while he set down to dredge his filthy Passaic for poetry, Williams still feels compelled to justify.

Claiming a sophisticated global view despite a commitment to one’s home in

America still requires an assurance that one is ‘not uninformed,’ as Williams insists of Hartley, that one is not leading the “stupid, hemmed-in kind of life”

136 (qtd. in Pritchard 80) of which Pound accused Frost decades before. Despite his apologetic demeanor, Williams holds to his celebration of Hartley’s return, his recommitment to his home: “He came back, not to the New Mexico and the

Florida which he took in his stride, writing and painting many important records of his experience, but to Maine!—to his beginnings, the coast of Maine, its woods and its people, the fisher folk of Newfoundland in which he refound or rediscovered his roots” (Recognizable 154). For Williams, the significance of an early connection to a place is fundamental: “A stream has to begin somewhere,” he says in his discussions with Edith Heal, and “that somewhere seemed to me important” (I Wanted 74).

Williams’ proclivity for positive space, for wishing to write what is there, stems perhaps from his unique interactions with his place in the world: as a doctor in an era when house calls were becoming less and less a common practice, he was invited into a vast number of homes at the very kind of moment which precludes visitors—when a resident was giving birth, or falling to illness, or suffering the wounds of a sexual assault. Williams enters and leaves those private worlds; at once an intimate and an outsider. His own notion of home must have expanded to accommodate his extraordinary relationship with local houses and their residents, the opening doors inviting him in to an otherwise closed sphere. “He could be the conventional, conscientious country or city doc one minute, the savvy social observer the next, and of a sudden, the lyrically expressive grand American vista,” Robert Coles reported after accompanying

Williams on a round of house calls. Williams’ appreciation for the place he lived

137 and worked, Coles deduced, was like that of a churchgoer singing Paradise’s praises (“Remembering” 33-34). And while poets, scholars, and doctors alike have identified the link between Williams’ professional and personal connection to his surroundings and his experimental poetic, none have addressed fully the role of domestic space, both architectural and natural, in his oeuvre through which Williams creates a place-based poetic that explores the experiential nature of place and art: a home’s resounding architecture and spaces, and the impact of that spatial experience on Williams’ shifting poetic.

SEEING PAST THE VISUAL

To date, Williams has been considered largely through a visual lens, with

Marjorie Perloff leading the way in developing a complex overlay between the poet’s printed page—graphic, lineated— and the Modern artist’s diagrammatic image. It has made sense to superimpose these profiles. Williams’ romance with the visual arts, along with his relationships with the artists themselves, has provided a good deal of insight into his often typographic poetic. Bram Dijkstra and Dikran Tashjian have covered important ground on those fronts, and with good reason.1 Interestingly, much of the poet’s writing on painting and painters centers on place to begin with. “Unless you paint pure nothing,” as in other comments on Hartley, Williams insists “you paint a place—and in that place you will reveal all places in the world” (Recognizable 150).

Still, Williams’ association with the arts has often mesmerized us. Perloff has turned her keen eye to the ways Williams’ stanzaic form models itself upon

138 Cubism, hacking out an outline that tracks Williams’ ‘field of action,’ moving towards the physicality of the poem. In considering what she calls the “physical shape” of Williams’ poems— here “physical” means the poem on the page, not the space of the poem, the poem’s world—Perloff emphasizes an increasingly visual aesthetic in Williams oeuvre, one which originates in conforming metric standards which are soon jettisoned in favor of the “line cut,” a way of working syntax against line break that results in both an isolation and a friction. To Perloff, this is something akin to Cubism’s fragmented shapes speaking across the canvas, “the visual cut.” In speaking of Williams’ “Between Walls,” for instance, Perloff claims:

what looks symmetrical is in fact disparate and other. The poem means, Williams tells Babette Deutsch, “that in a waste of cinders, loveliness, in the form of color, stands up alive.” But, as so often, the poem Williams wrote is much better than the portentous meaning he ascribes to it. For what we admire in “Between Walls” is surely less the idea that beauty can be found even among trash, than the way this small observation is turned into a “field of action” in which line plays against syntax, visual against aural form, creating what Charles Olson was to call an energy-discharge, or projectile. Words are “unlink[ed] from their former relationships in the sentence” and recombined so that the poem becomes a kind of hymn to linguistic possibility.” (Dance 106-07)

However, when we focus on the visual sense above all others, above the dream of the world Williams’ work wants to contact, we forget the thundering importance for Williams of his job as a poet and a doctor to deliver things into life.

We must understand Williams’ ability to locate loveliness in cinders as a ‘small observation’ that functions as more than a visually and syntactically interesting focal point. Take Williams’ highest form of praise, heard here regarding Calas’ study of Hieronymus Bosch: “by illuminating Bosch’s life through his painting,

[Calas] has made him alive among us” (Recognizable 195). The notion of being

139 brought to life, a very real metaphor for Williams the baby doctor, pervades his way of seeing the world. His own poem dares to trace the space in between the city’s walls, the darkened margin of the alley way. And what a luminous discovery, he finds there:

the back wings of the

hospital where nothing

will grow lie cinders

in which shine the broken

pieces of a green bottle

(Collected Poems Vol. I 453)

If we take this poem out of its local environment, it is as if it discolors—a pinned butterfly; reduced to its visual parts “Between Walls” becomes mere

‘disparateness’ affecting ‘symmetry.’ By way of contrast, look at how Robert

Coles and Thomas Roma return its jagged lines home to the graffitied streets where it belongs, in their House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD. Lodged between Roma’s photographs of the homes Williams has visited on his medical rounds (Coles and Roma took the addresses from old logs kept by Williams’ son), “Between Walls” becomes a physical act of transformation. The two-page photographic spread we encounter before reaching the poem (the site of one of

Williams’ former house calls) causes a claustrophobia the poem’s title will confirm—graffitied walls, power lines like long thin cuts from a razor slice of

140 skyscape, brick silos and vinyl clapboard lying cemented to what we remember must be earth beneath endless concrete. Against the dead landscape, the hospital’s lifeless “back wings” reveal the forlorn stage of a fallen angel. “Where

/ nothing / will grow” (House Calls 88-93).

But enter the word “lie,” enjambing itself against that lifelessness, and see how, between the houses, the photographer has captured, beneath our initial spatial impressions, a place of life: a man, hands in pockets, back to us, stands beside a little girl, hair in pig tails, frozen in motion against the harsh lines, running from us, or is it hopping backwards onto the curb. And another child, smaller than the first, up to the man’s waist, hovers close against the man’s side.

From the transforming fire, in the burnt-out streets, life glows paradoxically in the waste land, the place “where / nothing / will grow.” The loveliness of the broken glass among the cinders is an image central to the poem’s movement, and through Olson’s ‘unlinking’ and Perloff’s ‘recombination’ we can hear how the

‘line cuts’ are working to highlight each word in a way that is new. Still, we miss the way the spent fire highlights the bottle’s new luminosity. And this is significant. While Eliot threatens, “I will show you fear in a pile of ash,” Williams finds a radiant gist, a new life. From that ash, one day, in Paterson’s Book Four, will rise a cure for cancer, the elemental gist, uranium and its power to smash the atom, as from something glowing in a test tube in a dark shed a medical breakthrough will be born:

Ah Madam! this is order, perfect and controlled on which empires, alas, are built

141 But there may issue, a contaminant, some other metal radioactive a dissonance, unless the table lie, may cure the cancer . must lie in that ash . Helium plus, plus what? (Paterson 178)

Now, the re-seen word “lie” reverberates between its definitions—one of stagnant prostration and the other a brilliant contrast to received truth. The conceptual glimmering of “Between Walls” may not be removed from its own alley, as Olson and Perloff wish. It is part and parcel of the poem’s language and way of shining, a glimmering portent of Williams' future. Coles and Roma allow the poem its place, both visual and emotional, rooted in its environment, a way toward re-thinking what Williams meant (in a letter to Deutsch cited by Perloff) when he called “Between Walls” a “pure imagistic poem.” And it is in the poetic image that Bachelard too locates the reverberative dream of language. Beyond syntax, beyond sound, the poetic image is the artist’s haunt and haunting. Like

Williams’ glass bottle mottled and transformed by fire—like Pinsky’s live coal,

Dante’s hellbound birds, the body of Olds’ father—it is the streetscape of

Paterson, the space in the ashes, to which the poet will keep returning to, echoed and renovated across the years.

What distinguishes Williams’ recurrent image, that is, is its presence in his daily experience of his locale: the neighborhood dog sniffing the mounds of garbage for something interesting, or the somersaulting fetus awaiting birth, or saxifrage, the flower that breaks the rocks. These are what he sees and returns to crossing through Rutherford to Paterson in his daily rounds, his walks up and down the town and city streets, or the living rooms of patients and friends, or his

142 own cluttered office, or high up, from his perch on Garret Mountain overlooking the falls. Out of this sense of physical and domestic space arises Williams’ poetry.

And while his line breaks make a new jazz-like music out of otherwise standard arrangements of speech, it is in the lived space of experience that his poems give us a new sense of place. Life flashes there, amid the row houses and power lines and, yes, the cinder heaps.

NEGATIVE SPACE

In pacing North Jersey, Williams often finds himself excavating and examining the ruins, the dilapidated malls and mills, exhuming old forms and language, and subsequently avoiding those deemed unfit for a new time. For him, the “covering cherub,” as Harold Bloom names it, of English literary tradition is something that, nearly as much as the overshadowing native

American Romantic tradition, with its towering Whitman, haunts and troubles.

Williams’ determination to celebrate a place, to remain home and explore its

“undeveloped milieu,” as he would say, frames itself not on sheer nationalistic delusion. “History, history!,” he cries in “The Fountain of Youth,” one of the partly imagined (but what histories are not partly imagined?) histories from In the American Grain, “We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery” (39).

Although working from a space built on historical violence and oppression, Williams doesn’t dodge a violent past to imagine a Whitmanian

America, cosmic, united, generous, yes, though not without its failures. “Why

143 does one not hear Americans speak more often of these important things?,” his alter ego, Pere Sebastian Rasles, asks. “Because the fools do not believe that they have sprung from anything: bone, thought and action. They will not see that what they are is growing on these roots. They will not look. They float without question. Their history is to them an enigma” (In the American Grain 113). Such a history, his city’s as well as his country’s, will not let itself be ignored except at our own peril, as he gives voice to the places, buildings and their residents, and the very rivers that surround him.

In building a viable method of acknowledging a mired, bloody set of roots, Williams works to find a way, as in “The Poor,” to make his joyous discoveries, such as the flash of color in the burnt alleyway, counter-intuitively seeking “delight” in the “anarchy of poverty” (Collected Poems Vol. I 452). It is not always easy to address a mottled space in a life-affirming way the way Williams tries to do in the early twentieth century, getting beyond the high demands of

English tradition—see, for instance, how Ruskin once belittled the domestic landscape of Victorian England, in his Poetry of Architecture of 1837:

The energy of our architects is expended in raising “neat” poor- houses, and “pretty” charity schools; and, if they ever enter upon a work of higher rank, economy is the order of the day: plaster and stucco are substituted for granite and marble; rods of splashed iron for columns of verd-antique; and in the wild struggle after novelty, the fantastic is mistaken for the graceful, the complicated for the imposing, superfluity of ornament for beauty, and its total absence for simplicity. (7)

What is lacking in these architectural snafus dotting the English countryside,

Ruskin thinks, is “a unity of feeling,” naturally the “first principle of good taste.”

One guesses that he would not make much of the alley behind the hospital in

144 Paterson, New Jersey. Ruskin displays assumptions of value that privilege the quality or expense of materials, and an educated aesthetic that both constructs a house and experiences it. But one must know not only how to build but how to read spaces and their “function of inhabiting” (Bachelard) which Ruskin forgets.

The people living in the poor-houses and charity schools remain out of sight.

Instead, the space around these forgotten lives—the negative space—is what

Ruskin focuses on, the utopian sense of what could be built.

Williams on the other hand, faced with a row of Hopper’s houses

“[wonders] what goes on inside, who’s there, why, for how long.” A strong connection exists between medical scrutiny and attention to place for Williams, a man who respected a painting that, like a patient, triggered a need for close analysis of “ourselves, the places, the houses, the streets we call our own” (Coles

House Calls 99). His desire to hear, and to be reached by, the residents of his hometown and the experiences and stories of his environs, is at great odds with

Ruskin’s assumptions, and subsequently with much Modernist sentiment regarding modern American life. Whitman tried to sing the praises of the

American landscape, and of the great city of New York, but Pound’s infamous review of Frost’s North of Boston reveals enough about expatriate attitudes towards the American provincial. When Pound says of that collection “A book about a dull, stupid, hemmed-in sort of life, by a person who has lived it, will never be as interesting as the work of some author who has comprehended many men’s manners and seen many grades and conditions of existence,” we see the

145 lines being drawn: the provincial mocked while the stimulating, mobile, and cosmopolitan urbane is elevated.

The sense that the native is inferior to the elsewhere is not new. Ruskin had unearthed his own critique of English architecture when he returned home from a trip abroad, contrasting it against the Italian style. But in its darkest corner, turn of the century critique offers no salvation, even in an imagined elsewhere. Eliot’s Waste Land offers , of course, the ultimate poetic manifestation of such Modernist negative space—the final desolate frontier for the Western world where the dead landscape and its “dead tree [gives] no shelter.” These attitudes persist. Recently, paging through the introduction to Gaston

Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, I encountered Ruskin’s ghost, a new Poetics of

Architecture. Here John Stilgoe, introducing the 1994 edition of Bachelard’s book, complains that we live “in an age of so much homogenized space,” he writes, “so much shoddy, cramped, dimly lit, foul-smelling, low-ceilinged, ill-ordered structure.” Looking back to Bachelard, he says, “offers not only methods of assaying existing form but ways of imagining finer textures.” Due to Bachelard’s ability to lift architectural surroundings into poetic reverie, Poetics of Space is a dream of ascension, Stilgoe contends it is a book that is valuable precisely because it “makes its readers dissatisfied with much contemporary structure and landscape, for it demonstrates to its readers that space can be poetry” (x).

And yet, while Stilgoe finds fault with dim lighting and low ceilings, leaving an assumption about what it means to read a space poetically largely unexplored, the irony is that Bachelard himself, to a great extent, is actually

146 capable of glorifying the cramped, the small, the dimly lit—like Williams before him. For Bachelard, the space comes to life in the spark of the person experiencing it as “the function of inhabiting” infuses the space with meaning and purpose, with poetry, even and especially in the corners. Compare, for example, the work Williams wrote in 1917, giving voice to a woman who might have lived in Ruskin’s poorhouse nearly a century before, in his “Portrait of a

Woman in Bed” from Al Que Quiere:

This house is empty isn't it? Then it’s mine because I need it. Oh, I won’t starve while there’s the Bible to make them feed me. (Collected Poems Vol. 1 88)

The title frames this piece as a ‘portrait,’ suggesting the kind of poem that might offer itself up for the very kind of visual study Perloff and others have explored, and its colloquial voice confirms Brian Bremen’s descriptions of the tensions that

Williams exploits between poetic and prosaic language. Overwhelmingly, however, Williams’ poem is more in line with Philip Levine’s working class portraits than with Stevens’ abstracted “So-and-So Reclining On Her Couch.”

Unlike that particular faceless roundabout of language, where Stevens conceptualizes the woman into a “mechanism” or “apparition,” “Portrait of a

Woman in Bed” seeks to memorialize and pay tribute to the individual, perhaps draped with more fiction than the poet will bother to lay out in later poems.

Here, early on, Williams is grappling with the difficulty of giving voice to those

147 for whom there are few other records or recordings. He feels the challenge, and his own cumbersome place in it:

Try to help me if you want trouble or leave me alone— that ends trouble.

The county physician is a damned fool and you can go to hell!

You could have closed the door when you came in; do it when you go out. I’m tired. (88)

While the woman claims that abandoning her would result in a kind of resolution, ‘ending trouble,’ Williams, as doctor, as poet, as human being, cannot abandon her, despite her curses. Instead, his telltale excitable exclamation point, the monosyllabic lines: “and you / can go to hell!” reveal the poet’s admiration, even love, for this woman’s fiery spirit and straight talk. The poem’s final stanza underscores the visitor status of the poem’s “you”; having neglected to shut the door on the way in, a fact the woman spits out with loathing, the visitor—

Williams, the local physician—has diminished her humanity, leaving this private scene open to the world. The woman’s instruction allows the poet a chance to make amends by closing the door again on his way out—acknowledging her claim of ‘tiredness,’ he relieves her of this performance.

The man who sought poetry in this scene is the same man who actually finds new language and new personas (both self and other) shaped by the domestic spaces behind each closed door as he goes his rounds. Accompanying

148 Williams on his house calls, Robert Coles recalls how the poet relished his connections with the places and people of Paterson:

Dr. Williams was quick to tell his young listener to “look around, let your eyes take in the neighborhood—the homes, the stores, the people and places, there waiting to tell you, show you something. It was as if to this traveling and now talking “doc” (as he wanted to be called by the “folks” in whose homes he came—“Doc Bill” or often “Doc W,” not Doctor Williams), there were voices out there, in buildings as well as individuals, having their always available say, if only “we passers-by” would willingly “give them a hear, let them get to you.” (House Calls 8)

What Coles does not name is the extent to which the poet’s desire to hear the voices of his place leads Williams down the darkest alleys. In this extended domicile he finds himself both insider and outsider, estranged—a place where to ‘let them get to you’ is to lose part of the self and the larger landscape in order to fully experience the woman’s complaint and the emphasis of the two-word line where she curses the poet-doctor, and you: “The county physician / is a damn fool / and you / can go to hell!”

POSITIVE SPACE

In time, Williams will light the corners of those houses, in Book 4 of

Paterson, singing:

Brighten . . the corner where you are! (172)

The old Protestant hymn finds a good home in Paterson; for its mission makes clear the moral requirement the Doctor feels to his patient, and the poet to his

149 place. In its luminous reflection dancing off the right margin, the “are!,” an emphatic reminder of the physical reality of this place, comes short and fast.

Williams’s position often begins with a positional stance: his Paterson against

Eliot’s Waste Land, for one. Take 1923’s “Spring and All” and how it challenges

April as the “cruelest month” with its new life rising and shivering like a newborn babe from the seemingly lifeless muck. From a “waste of broad, muddy fields / brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen” comes the shining clarity of the new world:

All about them the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined— It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of entrance—Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted they grip down and begin to awaken (Collected Poems Vol. 1 183)

Against the green life of vegetation, the newborn vegetation enters the new world. The poem is an organic iteration of “Between Walls,” “The contagious hospital” once again yielding to the “profound change” of transformation: out of sickness new birth, out of spent cinders new fire. Though

Eliot asks “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” (58), Williams retorts: these lives, these roots, in this place. Yes, they rise along the road from Rutherford to Paterson, even now, in late winter:

All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

150 stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines— (183)

Not mere colorless muck, but “reddish” and “purplish”—there is still color in the seemingly lifeless landscape. It is the unexpected color Williams will find in

“Pastoral” as well, where “the houses / of the very poor” will yield decaying items in their yards, which, the poet claims, “if I am fortunate,” will be:

smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors. (Collected Poems Vol. I 63)

Where The Waste Land finds “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water” (58) Williams counters, as here in In the American Grain, to tell us the story of the place that springs around us, the dream of awe in the face of rebirth: “they watched the recreative New unfolding itself miraculously before them” (27). Eliot’s dry stone is only a moment in Williams’ larger cycle.

The water will return—from the Falls it will move down the Passaic and out to sea, and then begin again. To be in a place is to hear the sound—the roaring, the trickle, the crash—that the Waste Land’s philosophy lacks. To eat a pear is to move beyond Stevens’ fruit, merely “philosophically hard,” as Williams scoffs in

“A Place, Any Place, To Transcend All Places.” To deliver a woman’s child is to remove from mere metaphor Prufrock’s patient etherized upon a table.

Like “Spring and All,” Williams’ poems after World War I and into the

1920s will continue to carve out a place in opposition to Modernism’s escalating

‘heap of broken images.’ Let us leave the New World, Williams writes in In the

151 American Grain, for something better, for a “new locality.” And into that new locality let us continue to make our way as American poets—working to overcome “the hard, repressive pioneer soil of the mind” that Williams fears in

“Voyage of the Mayflower.”

Without expatriating, ‘running away’ in some form or another, how does the American artist handle his uneasy inheritance. Work where you find yourself by “inheritance, chance, accident” (Collected Vol. II 54) the poet will answer, and brighten the corner where you are. If Williams’ earlier poems struggle to locate his place in the scene, like the oblivious physician of “Portrait of a Woman,” they will lead to the kind of deceptively fruitful environment he locates in his effort to counter Eliot in “Spring and All,” which will yield itself one day to the discerning spatial exploration of “Between Walls” where the poet explores a most unlikely hollow of life. And while the city of Paterson and its histories have gone well-studied in Williams’ oeuvre, it is the spaces of his world themselves that come to be delineated in the poem. Ultimately Paterson’s Book 5 will say—as it nears the end, ironically—that even now “It is early / the song of the fox sparrow / reawakening the world / of Paterson” (205). A place rediscovered in the old exercise of daily renewal—again and again, a New World.

Not any world, or a vast one, for Williams, but specifically “the world / of Paterson.” Here is where the poet lives. In “Danse Russe” we find him within his very house, a domestic interior where we encounter the kind of wishful thinking that fuels Williams’ earlier poems and their search for life in a dead landscape, in this case the comic sense of imaginative privacy in a suburban

152 home. The domestic scene is subjunctive, playful, safe: “If I when my wife is sleeping / and the baby and Kathleen / are sleeping,” increasingly subjunctive as possibility grows dependent on the poem’s ability to name the scene of the world: “and the sun is a flame-white disc / in silken mists / above shining trees.” If all of these confluences of person and cosmos and proof of metaphor should align, “if I in my north room / dance naked, grotesquely / before my mirror,” (Collected Poems Vol. I 86-87) then no one will be there to contradict the poet’s own sense of space, of self and body and home, a dance private even to the dwellers of the home’s intimate interior:

waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,--

Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household? (87)

Williams penned this poem and its grotesque dance after attending a performance of the Russian Ballet in New York City (Mariani 146). Reading its private movements as the poet’s own ballet, an intimate twisting that occurs in the subjunctive of inner walls, we have another ars poetica on our hands, a cavorting fantasy of artistry and personal space. In “Danse Russe,” the poet invites us in to witness his happy genius, without comment: the joyful outline of body, the lyrics of relished loneliness. The gesture, for Williams, then in his thirties, is one related to spatial determination—the isolated artistic figure

153 revealing how he has managed to grow inside these shadowed walls, here in

Rutherford, a happy genius surrounded by family, home, town, friends, and life.

“He called for others to come into the sunlight with him,” Mariani writes, “to see the world around them that had always been there but which had been ignored or obfuscated by symbol or decorum” (145).

The poems around Al Que Quiere!—“Danse Russe,” “Portrait of a

Woman,” even “Tract” or “The Wanderer” where the poet tests his spatial relationship with his world—reveal a time when the poet was in fact finding a way to sketch his home and its transformations, “[immersing] himself in the flux of life” (Mariani 145). It may be the protective walls of the home that allow the poet his continued daydream of isolation and delightful artistic absurdity.

Certainly “Doc Bill” (Coles House Calls 8) must have needed just such an interior space to cast off his professional mask. But, increasingly, the world outside his door at “9 Ridge” would draw out the “happy genius,” and Williams would come to allow himself the creative freedom to speak of the spaces not between, but beyond those walls.

THE DOOR OPENS

Into the 1920s Williams’ poems will show the poet-doctor on the threshold of the community, seeking admittance. Coles’ recollection reveals Williams’ anxiety as protector of the sick: “Remember, the doc has his own reasons to be afraid,” Williams had told him, “nervous: is he going to be up to the job” (House

154 Calls 63). In his “Complaint,” published in 1921’s Sour Grapes, we see the doctor teetering between two worlds, the outsider at last welcomed in:

They call me and I go. It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks. The door opens. I smile, enter and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy! (Collected Poems Vol. I 153-154)

The sense of duty that the beginning of the poem offers is surpassed by the intimate encounter once he is admitted inside. Roma’s photograph, paired with the poem in House Calls, gives us one of the front doors at which Williams had knocked: number 402, framed by a dizzying outline of cut-outs and lines. I can see the poet’s ghost there, holding his medical bag, awaiting entry into the home of a patient who needs him at a time when all other strangers would be barred. “A house call brings two worlds together,” the doctor had once told a young Coles (56). When the door opens—not a woman great with child, but a

“great woman” consumes the doctor’s and poet’s attention. The drastic shout of

“Joy!” at the thought of the birth of the woman’s tenth child is Williams’ special majesty in the face of birth, however complicated, against whatever impoverished landscape. Still, the poet reveals his fear of giving the woman appropriate treatment, both medical and poetic. He does not want to leave the

155 door open as he did in “Portrait of a Woman.” Now he wants to give this patient her due and closes the poem this way: “I pick the hair from her eyes / and watch her misery / with compassion” (154). He angles for an appropriate emotional response—an improvement from “Portrait,” perhaps, but not the kind of awareness of his place that will come in Paterson, Book 2 when he acknowledges:

“In that I forget / myself perpetually—in your / composition and decomposition

/ I find my . . / despair!”

By the time he has come to write “Complaint,” Williams has grown increasingly connected to his home, and we see the developments of his oeuvre—the opening up in the 1920s and 1930s as the poet moves beyond the threats of artistic expatriation upon his own surety of art and place found in rooms such as the one in this poem. Pound’s coercions do not rattle Williams’ soul as they once did, although they can still sting. In a letter dated March 18,

1922 Pound writes, seeking help for Eliot who he claims is “at the last gasp,” on the verge of a breakdown. “I think you are suffering from nerve[s],” he tells

Williams, and “that you are really afraid to leave Rutherford.” While the comment lies buried halfway down the page, it is the first thing to which

Williams responds on the 29th, after dismissing Eliot. “What the hell do I care about Elliot [sic]?,” he bellows, and then: “About my nerves: they’ve survived you; today more able than yesterday” (Pound and Williams Selected Letters 53-59).

And, eventually, in Paterson Book 2, he will go so far as to say: “Why should I move from this place / where I was born? knowing / how futile would be the search” (75).

156 As he parses his role as resident, father, husband, doctor, and friend to those in and around Rutherford, as he continues to move through doors, he will confront Bachelard’s notion of the significance of “the function of inhabiting”— the role of the inhabitant and the way in which a space is lived in, delineated, experienced, and interpreted. For Bachelard, such a function manifests itself in the form of a place. Through inhabitation, a space is altered, a structure enlivened by presence, by use, and perspective. Such a definition can help to address how Williams attempts to celebrate his place in a way that resists the condemnation of Pound’s and others’ criticism for staying at home, even as he balances the difficulties of finding a language for such celebration in the face of the poverty, industrialization, and governmental failure that surround Paterson,

New Jersey. A poem like “The Poor” reveals the way that contact with a place, any place, can alter one’s perception:

It’s the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements

Or a cast iron balcony with panels showing oak branches in full leaf. It fits the dress of the children

reflecting every stage and custom of necessity— Chimneys, roofs, fences of wood and metal in an unfenced

age and enclosing next to nothing at all: the old man in a sweater and soft black hat who sweeps the sidewalk—

157 his own ten feet of it— in a wind that fitfully turning his corner has overwhelmed the entire city (Collected Poems Vol. I 452-453)

Read in isolation, the poem feels antiquated and even inappropriate—the speaker could be construed, sadly, as one who seeks to aestheticize conditions of poverty. In this vein, the very symmetrical visual quatrains might be said to keep the poet safe and uniform against the poverty kept at arm’s-length. But placed against a greater backdrop of spatial dialogue—we can see how Williams is creating a positive space, a coloring of what is there, as an alternative to the kind of modern critique that has privileged Pound’s esotericism over, say, the perceived regionalism of Robert Frost, a critique that Williams fears capable of bulldozing over the provincial and its residents.

If nothing else, Williams challenges Ruskin’s assumption of “the first principle of good taste” and thus defies a culture that yearns for a “unity of feeling.” Rather than unity of feeling, then, we find an anarchy, for which the speaker claims if not beauty, at least delight, a delight in asymmetry, in the design of things as they have come to be. Bachelard too offers a celebration of the unruly when he worries how “over-picturesqueness in a house can conceal its intimacy” (12). Still, if there is intimacy in Williams’s scene, it is held at bay.

Williams cannot yet cross the threshold between outside and inside. Perhaps the hegemonic critique does bear weight after all, for the speaker here views the scene solely from the outside, the oak tree’s branches poking through the railings, the chimney, roofs, and fences observed, along with the

“dress of the children” rather than the children themselves. But no, for here is an

158 old man, sweeping. And just here, something shifts, as the poet moves from sight to touch. For the man’s sweater and black hat—which is not touched yet described with the sensorial term “soft”—begins to approach a kind of tentative intimacy.

By coming into contact with a human being, the speaker himself is changed. He can no longer keep the whole scene in view and settles, with the sweeper, on those ten feet of sidewalk, a smallness and an immensity illuminated by Bachelard’s notion of the interplay between house and cosmos, where the house becomes “an instrument with which to confront the cosmos. […] Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world” (Bachelard 46-47). Behind this ten feet of concrete stands the home that will protect the man from the rigid wind that is beginning to “[overwhelm] the entire city.” The wind’s ‘overwhelming’ force brings in a supernatural alteration of the poem—through contact with a human being the eye which has found artistry in the scene recognizes there are things beyond control—which, looking back, were present from the beginning, inherent in anarchy.

As Coles writes in House Calls: “The doctor and the patient behold one another out of need, out of interest, out of their shared humanity” (77). Williams, exploring this mutual sense of home, seeks further and deeper connections with its residents, and the experience will change him. As he wrote in his introduction to the journal Contact in 1920: “We seek only contact with the local conditions which confront us,” for in the “perfection of that contact is the beginning not only of the concept of art among us but the key to the technique also”

159 (Recognizable 66). As his goals move from the artistic to the humane, Williams will begin to reposition his own sense of artistic contact within the frame of the home:

a physician often comes upon delightful objets d’art inauspiciously lighting the days and years of some obscure household in almost any suburban town—anywhere, everywhere on his rounds. All sorts of things which, if he is fortunate, he will share with his friends and acquaintances in praising. My own small town in Rutherford is like any other in that.

So much is this so, that I have more than once amused myself making collections of rare and beautiful objects about the town, in my mind of course, that it is a pity so few can see to enjoy. (Recognizable 129)

Here, from his essay “Effie Deans,” Williams fantasizes a Democratic Art Show— one in which the paintings (and eventually, objects, furniture, and people themselves) might reproduce the 1913 Armory Show to become a shared communal artistic and domestic experience. Williams’ enthrallment with ‘art’ is eventually revealed, as in his oeuvre, as a fascination with the bits and pieces of a place, with its insights into the personalities and passions of his fellow citizens, his townspeople. “I mean not pictures alone but all sorts of things,” he explains:

“furniture, fabrics, books, letters even, occasional pieces of jewelry such as my own mother’s filigree earrings, all of greatest interest.” It is clear how the interior trappings of a home reveal a place’s historical and emotional timbre. “I know a woman who has ten of the most pleasing bed quilts her grandmother left her years ago,” he explains. “You just want to lift them and hold them in your hand they are so fine” (129). Aesthetic quality, ‘fineness,’ is translated in the doctor’s

160 vision as a thing of comfort and tactility. Modest paintings morph into living monuments, keys to an oral tradition:

We ought to get Elizabeth Heckman’s two granduncles back again. I never passed them up—or their story, when I went there for a call. One was sour faced, in black, his mouth drawn down bitterly at the corners. He was the one who made the money. The other, his younger brother, in a blue coat, his cheeks suspiciously bright red, his head cocked back haughtily, his mouth curled upward with a smile. He it was who ate a ten dollar bill between two slices of his mother’s bread to show his amusement and indifference. We’d have to have those. (131-32)

The painting has been transformed here into the figures themselves: the reserved older brother, the vivacious alcoholic younger brother, both living residents of this place where green glass shines from cinders, and art and domestic space merge into a new reality.

FINDING HIS PLACE

While Rudman thinks of Williams as a man always on the brink of breakdown, the poet sees himself as motivated by a dogged optimism, the track of his poems revealing how joy and despair are linked forever to his place in the world. It is the details and the locality that are essential for Williams. “It is the particularization of the universal,” which presents “the unique field of the artist”

(Recognizable 138). The motivation to explore Paterson in epic form comes through in his short lyric “Paterson: The Falls” of 1944: “What common language to unravel?,” (Collected Poems Vol. II 57) he asks here, knowing the poem must enact how the place marks the body of its inhabitants:

disembodied roar! the cataract and

161 its clamor broken apart—and from all learning, the empty ear struck from within, roaring . . . (58)

By exploring his home, these disconnected sounds of a place—the ‘disembodied roar’ of the falls and the rushing river—will be re-embodied as they are brought together into the field of the poem, the ear filling with the noise of Paterson.

Discovering his connection to place, and to home and to family, fully confirmed in his later years (despite the shaky early start—proposing marriage to

Florence after being snubbed by her sister—and subsequent lecheries), Williams celebrates his late revelation in Journey to Love, published in 1955. In this belated sense of homecoming, we hear what Williams found to celebrate in Marsden

Hartley’s return to Maine. A “native completion” he’d called it, a way of synthesizing: “the mind, the body, and the spirit drawn gradually together into one life and finally flowering.” An integration made possible through his return to the own place, his home, Williams sees, Hartley coming “home to America, to

Maine, to complete his life” (Recognizable 149).

Here, in these late poems, we find Williams’ own coming home. Here we find Paterson’s counterpart in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in a place recovered at last:

What do I remember that was shaped as this thing is shaped? (Collected Poems Vol. II 311)

Eight years before his death, Williams will recognize his impulse for detail as a confirmation of living in a particular place, here in North Jersey, realizing all that has always been at stake:

162 Approaching death, as we think, the death of love, no distinction any more suffices to differentiate the particulars of place and condition with which we have been long familiar. (318-19)

Williams’ triadic lines, in their attempt to fully capture the movement of meditative speech—the sound of himself speaking to the woman he has known for fifty years and more—is a formal manifestation of his love for his home, with its streets and its houses. In the end, it is the fear of losing this place, and the particular details that make up that place, that most threatens. In fact, the sound of his speech, a speech made up of the particulars of this place, may be all he has to hold on to as he struggles with debilitating health crises. It is its details which have given shape to Paterson, and the reason at heart for his great epic poem: the radiant gist of the one place he calls home.

In House Calls, Robert Coles and Thomas Roma remind us of the physical detail of Williams’ sense of place and of his connection to home. There is, for example, the tragedy of “The Dead Baby” and the horrible ‘sweeping clean’ of a house which must bear such an unnatural loss:

Hurry up! any minute they will be bringing it from the hospital— a white model of our lives a curiosity— surrounded by fresh flowers (Collected Poems Vol. I 268)

For the revelations of Paterson are the revelations of this place in all of its necessary representations and cries:

163 —Say it, no ideas but in things— nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees

bent, forked by preconception and accident— split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained— secret—into the body of the light! (6-7)

Without referent, the ‘things’ behind the ‘idea’ float as dangerously unanchored as they do in Eliot’s Waste Land or Pound’s Cantos, rolling across languages and times that cannot touch. To see the photographs of the houses in House Calls return us to the concrete world under Williams’ daily scrutiny. The photographer’s eye frames these homes, many of them dilapidated, in a way that makes them shine. In their interesting lines and promises, maybe, of interior comfort, we see what Williams saw and was delighted by. Coles’ memories of

Williams reveal the interiors, the language of the patients Williams would visit, the language of human connection. A door opens, and the doctor encounters people for whom he has come to care for deeply, and through whom he hopes the mystical element of his world might become clearer. A child asks to use the stethoscope Williams was holding so he could “listen to what’s going on.” And another child saying, “You can hear all the secrets, I bet” (41). Listening, hearing secrets, encountering poetry in the spaces and speech of his place—these are what constitute Williams’ days and nights as a poet and a doctor in Rutherford and Paterson.

To watch Williams’ poetry evolve is to watch a man grow increasingly bound to his place. For while Williams lies awash in artistic influence, European as well as American, both visual and literary, not to mention musical and

164 dramatic, it is Williams’ home in Rutherford, New Jersey and the nearby city of

Paterson that come to possess his artistic imagination. Yes, pieces of the literary landscape hover into view in his later years, as in the opening of Paterson Book 5, where we hear the echoes of Eliot’s “old eagle” in the opening stanzas:

In old age the mind casts off rebelliously an eagle from its crag (205)

But now, far from Paterson’s beginnings where the faces of literary giants overwhelm the shapes of the rocks over Paterson Falls, the literary reference is a momentary ‘rebellion’ of the mind, one which soon enough leads back to his old, familiar world and the shape of a face remembered:

—the angle of a forehead or far less makes him remember when he thought he had forgot (205)

In the process of exploring Paterson as his topos, as he tells us in I Wanted to

Write a Poem, Williams moves from mere literary influence to his own defined sense of home and has found a rich life there in its corners. It is a transformation predicted by the shine of a broken green bottle laying against the cinders. A sense of place, then, not just the poem’s look on the page, but the poet-doctor’s unique relationship with his world, and those doors through which he walks bringing him closer to his townspeople. It is something which Coles and Roma remind us of in the three-dimensional world of House Calls. Williams’ change of heart regarding his place in New Jersey, from anxious literary inspiration to a

165 labor of love, is a slow process marked by a life tied to a place through patients and medical rounds, through daily life, art, loves, memories, children, doors opening, doors he will learn to close: “I may have been influenced by James

Joyce who had made Dublin the hero of his book,” he will confess. After all, he had been reading Ulysses. But soon enough, he adds, “I forgot about Joyce and fell in love with my city” (I Wanted 72).

166 Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon

Press, 1994. Rpt. of La Poetique de l’Espace. 1958.

Bremen, Brian A.. William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1993.

Pritchard, William H. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. New York: Oxford UP,

1984.

Coles, Robert. “Remembering Dr. Williams.” Rigor of Beauty: Essays in

Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. Ed. Ian D. Copestake. Oxford: Peter

Lang, 2004. 29-34.

Coles, Robert and Thomas Roma. House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD.

Brooklyn: Powerhouse, 2008.

Costello, Bonnie. “William Carlos Williams in a World of Painters.” Boston

Review. (Jun./Jul. 1979). Web.

Dijkstra, Bram. The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early

Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Princeton, Princeton UP: 1969.

Eliot, T. S. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. 1922. Ed.

Lawrence Rainey. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: Norton,

1980.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound

Tradition. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985.

167 ---. “‘Living in the Same Place’: The Old Mononationalism and the New

Comparative Literature.” World Literature Today 69.2 (Spring 1995): 249-55.

Pound, Ezra and William Carlos Williams. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and

William Carlos Williams. Ed. Hugh Witemeyer. New York: New Directions,

1996.

Ribbat, Christoph. “‘Information and Tenderness’: Williams, Photography, and

‘The Girl with a Pimply Face.’” Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of

William Carlos Williams. Ed. Ian D. Copestake. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004. 177-

193.

Rudman, Mark. “William Carlos Williams in America: Part One.” American

Poetry Review. 37.2 (Mar./Apr. 2008): 53.

Tashjian, Dickran. William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920-1940. New

York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978.

Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I

1909-1939. Ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New

Directions, 1986.

---. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II 1939-1962. Ed.

Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1988.

---. I Wanted To Write A Poem. 1958. New York: New Directions, 1978.

---. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970.

---. In the American Grain. 1925. New York: New Directions, 1956.

---. Paterson. 1946-58. New York: New Directions, 1995.

---. “A Place (Any Place) To Transcend All Places.” Kenyon Review 8.1 (Winter

168 1946): 55-58.

---. A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. Ed. Bram

Dijkstra. New York: New Directions, 1978.

169 Note

1 See Bonnie Costello’s essay “William Carlos Williams in a World of Painters” which appeared in the Boston Review (Jun./Jul. 1979) for a thorough assessment of Williams’ reception, by Dijkstra and Tashjian among others, as a painter’s poet.

170 DISMANTLING THE HOUSE:

STEPHEN DUNN AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN HOME

-Chapter 4-

THE ROOM AND THE WORLD

We watch Stephen Dunn as geologists watch a volcano, Helen Vendler once said

(Music 444). He was that rare breed: the male domestic lyricist. But a man writing about his home wasn’t, strictly speaking, an entirely new species of American poet. Dunn hails from a long tradition of Modernist influence—Dave Smith once called him “the youngest Modernist I know” (29)—an influence which bore its share of unlikely domestic male poets against a cultural backdrop of expatriation and cosmopolitanism.

From these men Dunn inherited a lyric form both “manly” and “domestic.” Those terms were not quite at odds at the turn of the twentieth century—think of Frost’s numerous poems depicting the stereotypically manly task of chopping wood for the fireplace, that hearth at the center of the home. What Frost meant when he called for a “manly” poetic, however, was not one reflecting the masculine tasks of the household, but the need for a poetic language rooted in local dialect and spoken in genuine speech.

Frost was rebelling, as William Carlos Williams would come to do, against the high language of an English tradition which had been deemed, in its “feminine” embellishments, unsuited to the American experience.1 The preference for a speech- driven poetic as a way to define a particularly democratized American literary form carried over to the lyric subject which, it follows, began to take on the stuff of the everyday, including the domestic, which, in its ordinariness, provided an alternative to the grand epic form, a form no longer valid, as Whitman had made sure of. But Dunn, with his marital tension, penchant for surprise, and anxiety about the place in which he

171 lives, is the purest progeny of Frost, Stevens, and Williams—those poetic fathers to whom he looks for illumination of the everyday, and whose work he modeled—until the terrorist events of September 11, 2001—a fraught commitment to one wife in one home in one place in the American Northeast—what Dunn came to describe as a life

“doing a few same things / in the same house with the same person, / settled and unsettled, in for the long haul” (Different Hours 31).

From his poetic forefathers Dunn learned the significance of the hearth—that fireplace which requires work and a sense of duty, but which in return offers transformation and warmth—and a way of looking closely at those “few same things.”

By 1986, the poet’s sense of responsibility to those few same things led one critic to announce that Dunn had achieved “the direct attempt to sympathize with, go towards, and finally enter and embody that world wherein reign house, family, neighborhood, job, retirement plan” (Rector 503).

When Vendler compared Dunn to a volcano, little did she know—or perhaps in her nihilistic wisdom, she did—how, following the relatively joyous literary bubble of the

1990s in which one critic counted a total of 27 volumes of verse whose titles contained some form of the word “angel” (Gilbert 238), Dunn’s oeuvre would indeed sputter and erupt in the space of its suburban lifetime, so that his always-threatened coherence of self and work and family would at last come to burst. It should not startle even one of Dunn’s most occasional readers to find that the large rupture in Dunn’s poetic, and for that matter, in his personal life, occurs most radically in the first two collections of poems (Local

Visitations and The Insistence of Beauty) to appear after the terrorist events of September 11,

2001.

Dunn, after all, has made a career out of correlating, often to the point of confusion, the artist’s personal, public, and poetic life. Many poems in The Insistence of

172 Beauty walk that “thin line,” as Dunn admits (Guernica). But here, nearing the tenth anniversary of that tragic day, no one has yet to record the depth to which that national disaster reordered the artist’s sense of architecture. It is an explicable oversight due to

Dunn’s signature “rhetoric of natural ease” (Baker 231) in which his familiar tone unaffectedly aggrandizes the mundane—a style which dates back to the ideals of those original Modernists who sought to create “a literature whose most powerful effect lay in the illusion it created of its unliterariness” (Lentricchia 182).

It’s a style critics like to call the “candid” or “intimate” in Dunn, citing his

“refreshing candor and self-reflexive wit” (deNiord) or “the intimacy and candor of his plain, pointedly spoken lyrics” (Muratori, rev. of Local Visitations). That crafted ease, which Dunn has honed over the past decades, tends to eclipse the poems’ structures and circumstances, even their prosodic organizations. The rift is most clearly experienced through a close rereading of the poems in sequence, which, with Dunn having now produced fifteen volumes and counting, is no weekend task, but a worthy task, I promise, which shows convincing evidence of life and art unfolding in close relation to each other, a full domestic sequence, a living oeuvre.

While there are new essays forthcoming on the author’s work, few critics have noticed the significance of Dunn’s poetic break in 2001, although some sense there is something amiss—and none has promised to take up the long view of the poet’s complicated Modernist development as a rare male domestic poet, his arc of prototypical American middle class desire and anxiety, which, translated to the page, comes to be sundered by 9/11. Read in this way, the collapse proves astonishing. The broken poetic of 2003’s Local Visitations enacts the trauma of that historical catastrophe, while the following year’s The Insistence of Beauty, in poems like “Grudges” and

“Dismantling the House,” addresses directly this tragic invasion of home, the phantom

173 prescience of which has haunted the poet since his earliest works, as far back as 1974’s

Looking at Holes in the Ceiling’s false ethical choice posed by a teacher of radicals, that of

“blowing up the Empire / State Building or a department store” (12), or even earlier, if we allow the germ of terror to be named in Dunn’s first-ever poems in print: the five short pieces collected in his chapbook, 5 Impersonations, where “The Rapist” glibly claims: “No one ever runs. I am small, deceptive / like this poem / that is already inside you.”

Dunn’s world has always been something threatened and threatening. In 1984’s

Not Dancing, he explored the pressures of outside forces pressing in—

Outside of the room was the world which had a key to the room, and knowing a little about the world he knew how pointless it was to change the lock. (“The Room and the World” 34)

Dunn knows the homeowner’s primal fear, that of home invasion, a neurosis handed down from the Great Depression—a time during which Americans lucky enough to maintain possession of their houses feared invasion by an increasingly indigent populace. It was a fear on which insurance companies began to capitalize, and one which Wallace Stevens both poked fun at in his letters and manifested in his own work.2

And while he expresses the insidious ways in which the human mind deals with terror, Dunn rarely forgets terror’s counterpart, humor. The poet Stephen Dobyns notes the unnerving quality of this combination, the poems’ “odd mixtures of worry and humor” (26). “I’ve learned your language,” Dunn warns in “The Artist as Lefthander”

(Landscape 36). Like “The Rapist,” the poem ends with a stealthy invasion meant to startle our notion of disaster: “I’ve gotten in to your workplaces and your homes,” he tells us

(36). His is an anxiety of being invaded complicated by the desire to invade, and Dunn’s

174 “trademark circumstance” of opposition, as the poet David Baker calls it (226), may help us to reconcile the surfeit of angels and terrorists that populate Dunn’s work. Their presence might further prove what Baker esteems in Dunn’s contradictions, that this is a poet capable of “a deep sense of terror” tempered by a “resonant spiritual investment”

(224-5). What Local Visitations and The Insistence of Beauty enact is that very terror and investment in their varying degrees of denial and admittance. Taken together, the two volumes form a double-response of shock and recovery.

ANGELS OF THE NINETIES

In the 1990s American culture became “awash with angels,” as Richard Wilbur put it in his poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World.” Nineties angels provided a kind of winged—or scarred, where wings once were—mascot for the times.3 The phenomenon crossed media, from film to fashion to literature, bedecking the cultural mindset. Those angels were like the musicians of the 1920s, the latest reconfigured muse. As a genre, poetry was not spared the winged shadows of those creatures, questionably divine in post-industrial America. In the workshop I myself took with

Dunn at Stockton College in New Jersey, my friend Donna Santoloci sketched male angels, all of which, Dunn pointed out one evening, seemed helplessly dumb. We took a second look, and sure enough, in each of her poems the angel-men spoke only one word each, a befuddled “What?”

I remember my own co-opting of the poor immortals for my teenage verse heavy with image and utopia, “where even now, the phone booths are crowding with angels / who fold in their wings to fit.” We were filled with the spirit back then. Or so thought

Roger Gilbert, the critic who counted each of the twenty-seven volumes of verse to arrive in that decade whose titles held the term “angel” or its variant, a number

175 excluding all the single angel poems which must still ghost the walls of dormitories.

Encapsulating the fad just before it would turn into the skulls and crossbones of the new millennium, Gilbert’s essay, entitled after Wilbur’s poem, “Awash with Angels:

The Religious Turn in Nineties Poetry” appeared in the summer of 2001, just a few months before 9/11.

It is interesting that Gilbert understood the decade’s angelic opulence as a symptom of religiosity, that he could believe they were “instruments of divine revelation,” giving “poets access to visionary possibilities” (239). While inclined to agree with Charles Altieri that post-60s American poetry largely marks a departure from belief, so that the poet was no longer elevated to a prophetic stature (191-224), Gilbert’s desire was to locate within the nineties angels a sincere form of spiritual quest, one which pivoted away from what he calls the “ironic eighties.” The problem is that the angels of the nineties are themselves highly ironic, intrepidly incongruous in their fast cars. They are more us than they are divine.4

It is that irony which Dunn, as a newly realized “lover of the discordant,” increasingly seeks out in the nineties (Landscape 27). Once in the seventies he had allowed for the thought of an angel in poetic earnest, the “dark angel” of the poem titled “The Dark Angel Travels with us to Canada and Blesses Our Vacation”:

. . . the moon on the water one evening was a trail to our house I still don’t know

what it means perhaps a dark angel singled us out for something arcane like happiness all I know is

the hurricanes the kitchen mishaps occurred elsewhere … (Full 50)

176 Here is the poet’s post-romantic wish for ‘arcane happiness.’ The kitchen mishaps borrow the threat of the kitchen knife, an early motif for Dunn, who elsewhere reminds us how “the kitchen knife / / wants to be held” (23). But here the dark angel, one more empowered than those we will meet in the nineties, keeps the dangers at bay, at least for the moment,

Among the powerless angels of that later decade, Dunn’s poem, “The Sacred,” makes evident enough the irony of angelic appearances in twentieth century New

Jersey, when students answering their teacher’s request for a sacred space keep returning to the car, “the car in motion, / music filling it” (55). It is not a spiritual quest that they are after, then, but a coming to terms with the disappointment of the spiritual which gives the poems of the nineties their relative optimism and tenderness. These poems make of their modern circumstance a sacred place there on “the bright altar of the dashboard” (55).

A collection like Myers and Weingarten’s New American Poets of the 90s makes abundantly clear how the poets of the nineties reconciled with their abandoned condition on earth, in poems like Lynn Emanuel’s strangely fond pieces handling her mother’s alcoholism, who “with the care of the very drunk, / handed him the plate”

(77), or her portrait of her father’s shunned mistress: “Tonight I will remember the model / With the wide, sad mouth” (77). Many of the poems gathered here offer a tender revelry of the fallen world—Marie Howe’s prose poem, “Part of Eve’s

Discussion,” most directly:

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies […] very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time. (159)

177

Eve’s adjustment to the modern world is one of déjà vu—repetition and nostalgia at once—a bittersweet celebration of the postlapsarian condition as she negotiates the borders of awareness and knowledge, seeking to name that unnamable moment right before the car begins to spin.

Indeed, cars are as ubiquitous as angels in the poetry of the nineties, a decade which saw the Gulf War and its ensuing oil spills and oil fires. Still, Bruce Springsteen’s

“Thunder Road” sought to “trade in these wings on some wheels.” That song, released in 1975, reappeared on the Greatest Hits in 1995, fitting resonantly into that later decade.

An early manifestation of the nineties’ winged poetic, “Thunder Road,” as Springsteen says, offers an “invitation to a long, and earthly, very earthly journey”5:

Well now I'm no hero That's understood All the redemption I can offer, girl Is beneath this dirty hood With a chance to make it good somehow Hey what else can we do now Except roll down the window And let the wind blow back your hair. 6

A lover, then, to replace a savior, and wheels for wings—Springsteen distorts the traditional carpe diem trope, for the singer woos his beloved not through a threat of beauty’s dissipation in due time, but with a celebration that what’s here will have to be good enough. “You’re not a beauty, but hey, you’re alright,” the lover makes clear in another verse. Springsteen’s highway is a place without limits leading us deeper into our own world, where the body experiences its place—wind and fast cars and the mysterious energy of night with its restlessness. “I’ve known an edginess, come evening,” Dunn writes in “Night Truths.”7 And Springsteen’s night offers the possibility of overcoming limits—“Well the night's busting open / These two lanes will

178 take us anywhere”—a luxury Dunn dreamt of as early as 1974 in “Poem,” from Looking for Holes in the Ceiling:

When the sun goes down women who have loosened celebrations listen for the sound of keys— and boys, mad with their age and stuck in small skins, imagine their bones the chassis for some Buick. (10)

It’s an old trope, this movement towards evening. Throughout his work, Dunn transforms the usual lament of age and darkness into a buzzing energy, a restlessness.

From the boys who “imagine their bones / the chassis for some Buick” we hear an agitated hum. Then, too, there are “the sound of keys”—a freedom offered by that other automobile poem, “The Sacred,” which dreams of “how far away / a car could take him from the need / to speak, or to answer” and ends with “the key / in having a key / and putting it in, and going” (Between 55). It’s a fantasy of escape—Dunn’s dream of “going” revealing as much about Springsteen’s dream of an earthly journey as it does about

Dunn’s own domestic anxiety.

In the nineties, Dunn dreams of the night as a time of possibility—a writhing desire to go somewhere, dreaming “about night falling in a house / where anything can happen.” It’s not the speaker’s home, presumably, but some other imagined idealized place (“Not The Occult,” Landscape 53). There too, like Springsteen, Dunn tries to celebrate the nearly sufficient:

And I’m thinking of the time we lay ourselves down among the dwarf pines, looked up at the sky. Nothing was new up there, and down here the words for love stuck in their history of abuse. Angel, I wanted to say, meaning darling, it seems heroic how we survive each other, heroic that we try. (54)

179

“Angel, I wanted to say, meaning darling,” Dunn demurs. “Angel”—the diminishment of Gilbert’s religious term turns here into a gesture of affection. In the fallen world we find a borrowed language to console and praise. Here at the turn of the millennium the poet seeks solace in our often-failed attempts to connect with each other and our world. The angel embodies that failed effort. Reviewing Dunn’s Between Angels at the time of its publication, Steve Kronen reminded us of the angels who sprang from another Donne who wrote:

Just such disparity As is ‘twixt air and angels’ purity, Twixt women’s love and men’s will ever be (qtd. by Kronen 168; John Donne “Air and Angels”)

Like Donne, Kronen points out, Dunn works to “[illuminate] that rarefied ether that separates women and men, self and self, that passes between angels and air” (168).

The attempt to connect, failed as it may be, with its disparity between sheer air and angelic purity—lies all in the lover’s perception, and reveals what Dobyns, quoting

Dunn, calls Dunn’s “concern for the world,” the poet’s “sense of ineffectualness as again and again the speaker tries to navigate ‘among the bittersweet / efforts of people to connect, make sense, endure’” (26). As the domestic poet moves into the nineties, he finds in the angel motif the bittersweetness which defines so much American poetry at the time, its determined, broken tenderness, a sweetness which revealed itself “as if on loan” in the great mortgaged decade. That sweetness, Dunn says, “stays just long enough”

to make sense of what it means to be alive, then returns to its dark source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road it’s traveled to come so far, to taste so good. (44)

180

The heroics of “how we survive each other” will eventually lose their appeal for

Dunn, the effort stripped of its valiance and laid bare as an ineffective striving to no end,

Sisyphean, providing a catalyst for collapse after 9/11 when ineffective striving comes under intense scrutiny. But not yet, not here in this moment of relative innocence— celebrating the good enough, the stunted but enduring. By the time this poem appeared in

1991, the dwarf pines had become a running motif for Dunn, those scrubby trees around his property in Port Republic, New Jersey, desperate survivors of sandy soil, their diminutive, determined growth a praiseworthy thing, like the unbeautiful beloved of

Thunder Road.

Both Springsteen and Dunn are poets of the Jersey Shore in their ways, both lovers of that great lost cause: finding what will suffice in the earthly world. Like

Springsteen, Dunn too was thinking of wings and wheels long before their abundant appearance at the turn of the millennium. His own self-proclaimed credo—Paul

Eluard’s “There is another world and it is in this one”—rests not far from Springsteen’s earthly invitation, and both artists echo Wallace Stevens’ most necessary angel, that original angel of earth. In his essay “Poets, Poetry, and the Spiritual,” Dunn explains his own version of Stevens’ angelic poetic:

For years I’ve held dear Paul Eluard’s statement, “There is another world and it is in this one.” It has been my credo as a poet. I take as a given of my job the need to enact and deliver both worlds, which involves giving voice to interiorities and evanescences and to the surfaces that conceal and evoke them.” … “Our poems must read and sound as if we inhabit them.” (Walking 160)

For this poet of the world within the world, there is not only a doubling of duty—of both manifesting and offering up our world and its second life as illuminated by the poet—but also the necessity of inhabiting that world. Inhabiting—and I am thinking here of the full sense of the notion of inhabitation which philosopher Gaston

181 Bachelard contended was our home’s architecture’s dearest purpose—can be difficult with its supratemporal distractions, its many, as Bachelard says, interferences. With its daydreams and latent desires, the mere as if of inhabitation becomes an increasing pressure for Dunn, whom some have heralded as the poet of the suburban living room—a man who seeks to find “How to say what can’t be said / across a table, or bed.” (“Not The Occult,” Landscape 53).

PRAISE REFUGE, PRAISE WHATEVER YOU CAN

Throughout the nineties, Dunn inhabited his home in South Jersey as best he could, and vied to locate within those Pine Barrens and their ‘unequal claims of chestnut oaks and tenements’ that other world which Eluard discerned (Between 46).

Pioneering the decade’s obsession with feathery limbs, exploring the irony of spiritual assistance in this earthly world, his collection Between Angels appeared in 1989. The poems maintain the charming voice Dunn is known for, facilitating a seemingly autobiographical intimacy with the reader, an artistic journaling. The collection showed that what Altieri said of Dunn in the 1970s still held true, perhaps held more true in this collection of artfully arranged abstractions, poems that were not so much “the fruit of intense experience,” as “artful constructs of an aesthetic imagination” (Contemp Lit 207-

8). Consider the volume’s alpha and omega personae pieces, “The Guardian Angel” and

“The Retarded Angel,” which maintain that artful construction in their third person remove, brought closer as the reader finds that the angel—“he”—must be understood as the poet himself, or, as one critic says, as “you and me” (Kronen 166):

Even his lamentations are unheard, though now, in for the long haul, trying to live

beyond despair, he believes, he needs

182 to believe everything he does takes root, hums

beneath the surfaces of the world. (Between 16)

The short second lines give rest to the eye and pacing to the poem’s speech, also weighting those spare word pairings with the gravity of their negative space, their spare emphasis: though now, to believe. Separated spatially from qualifications and doubt, Dunn can allow the opposite of what is said, that is, that “everything he does takes root, hums.” For a moment the statement stands alone as a declaration—the eye’s certainty in what is visible, the mind’s finite field of vision—our own self-delusions laid bare.

For Dunn what “hums beneath the surfaces of the world” is, of course, anxiety and desire, not the shimmering result of our well-meaning efforts, but the restless noise of living a settled life, the poetic inheritance he received from his mentor Donald Justice, who gave us “Men At Forty.” “Something is filling them,” Justice tells us in that poem of mid-life crisis, “something / That is like the twilight sound / Of the crickets, immense” (76). In Between Angels however, this bastion of nineties quasi-optimism, the angel’s work—or the poet’s, the husband’s, the father’s work, or your own—futile as it is, makes its wished-for claims. The title poem, “Between Angels,” for example, reaffirms Dunn’s search for labor’s impact:

A child spills her milk; I’m on my knees cleaning it up—

sponge, squeeze, I change nothing, just move it around. The inconsequential floor is beginning to shine. (46)

The results of such effort, if they appear at all, for us, are at best tangential and unexpected, like an incidental polishing. “Perhaps the word ‘burnish’ best describes the

183 feeling tone,” Peter Campion will come to say of Dunn’s work in later years, when what

Altieri prized of Dunn’s artful construction gets confused with a Wordsworthian recreation of experience. By ‘burnished,’ Campion means that the poet has buffed out the emotion of original experience until it no longer creates a poetic emotion for the reader to retain. But in the nineties, the poet’s incidental polishing merely contributes to the world’s failed and imprecise beauty, and the emotive element remains intact, if refined.

The image of the inept homemaker and striving father signals a change from

Dunn’s early work in which he preferred the figure of the poet as carpenter. In his very first poems to appear in print there is a small poem entitled, “The Carpenter” in which he tells us that his

hands do it. They get away from me like children who go on to build houses in strange neighborhoods.

I can’t understand it.

I am always finding myself like a spider walking on things I couldn’t have done. (5 Impersonations)

While this carpenter-poet spins frameworks of self-surprise, his synecdochal artistry relies on a muse-like disconnect between artist and art. Four years later, A Circus of

Needs reconnects the artist to the art in “Creating the Conditions”: “I enter the building which is no more / than these blueprints in my hand / which shape themselves around me” (63). Starting off in iambic rhythm, the lines diminish to a few heavy beats per line as the carpenter gets lost in the rhythms of his imagined construction.

In 1976, we see Dunn develop the deliberate nature of such craftsmanship in “The

Carpenter’s Song,” where he writes:

184 And yes, let me be able to say I’m a builder of houses, a man who works slow and knows how hard it is to get the inside just right.

And let me declare I’ve been a lover of women without declaring it, and feel I’ve treated them better than wood, knowing I’ve been a husband of wood. (65-6)

“The Carpenter’s Song” reveals the poet’s theoretical melding of home, art, and love: the house, the poem, the beloved all requiring a slow working through difficulty. The metaphor implies more resolute construction, less accident. The earlier poetic line reflects that rigidity, short and inelegant, a pragmatic line for delivering information.

The carpenter does not cleverly break his lines for suspense, juxtaposition, or momentary opposite meaning, for Dunn has yet to arrive at his musical structuring of free verse. Still, the poem’s lines are finely planed, his hard labor striving to somehow get it “just right.”

But by the early nineties, in Between Angels, Dunn has come to understand that even failed work can shine. In Work and Love (1981), the poet found joy in imagining

“Icarus thinking / ‘not today,’ then doing / a little more work on his wings” (23). The poet understands the mythic, historical need to toil toward some dream, however disastrous the results may be. Later the metaphor will take root in the image of

“carpenter bees,” a movement away from the self, carrying a blended resonance of work and destruction: “I love the carpenter bees / in spring,” he tells us there, “mating in air, and I don’t mind / the holes they make in my house” (Landscape 84). Another triple construction of work, love, and home—house, bees, and poem, are all endangered, all in need of constant repair.

185 That ineffectual striving against atrophy, which gives life meaning and gives a shape to Dunn’s poetic, finds a likely friend in “The Guardian Angel,” who moves

“Afloat between lives and stale truths,” and “realizes / he’s never truly protected one soul” (15). By contrast, “The Retarded Angel,” who sits at the end of the collection on his off-balance perch, has “one wing / apparently useless.” “Whoever sent you,” Dunn remarks,

must have been desperate and accidentally brilliant, you

with whom we’d never argue, the damaged, unnerving, barely hopeful, last resort. (108-9)

While both poems use Dunn’s tercets, the later poem, in its winged limping, uses flatter metrical division, missing the single heavy beat of the shorter second lines Dunn puts to use in his more graceful poems. By comparison, “The Retarded Angel” appears prosaic, its words grouped into short, thick syntactic clusters. Still, the poem maintains its poetry, its angelic core, through its well-wrought line breaks, as in the separation of what is ‘desperate’ from what is ‘accidentally brilliant.’ This damaged angel, barely hopeful, inspires a spiritual reckoning, for living in the world demands a celebration of the flawed, an idea which Dunn expands upon in his 1999 prose poem, “Emblems”:

It’s nearing its end, our century of acquisition and dazzle, the quick score, the panache of images researched to deceive. So I say no more the peacock’s solo fashion show and its screech of pride. No more the eagle or hawk, those paragons with their good eyes for small prey and their superior flight. As emblems, let them be dead the way a doornail is dead as a comparison for dead. The way a mouse no longer invites us to consider how quiet it is. For the next century, I recommend the auk and the grebe. Heavy birds with small wings, inefficient flyer…” (Riffs 84)

Thus the poet moves into the new millennium with a tribute to inefficiency and heavy birds with small wings, defying our historically romantic definitions of birds’ grace and capability. Ironically, the poet learned of the auk’s extinction after composing the

186 poem, and, as with the image of the angel, Dunn understands its absence does not preclude its meaningfulness as a poetic reduction, an emblem.8 The poems themselves, then, lodge between angels, speaking by degrees of a bittersweet spiritual disappointment.

The guardian angel’s ineffectiveness does not stop him from trying, however, as he

“keeps wrapping / his wings around those in the cold.” Like the notion of the soul which

Wallace Stevens claimed obsolete years earlier in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of

Words,” this noble angel finds no use on earth. And yet Dunn finds a fitting form for our times in the broken angel, who like the auk or the grebe, provides a reminder of our world’s distorted beauty.

“Never,” Dunn tells us in “Beginnings,” must a poem begin with “the natural world,” “Except when its beauty / is arguable, perverse” (49). In the nineties, Dunn claimed to “love the local and crude / somehow made beautiful, all the traces / of how it got that way erased” (“Not the Occult,” Landscape 55) and one review of Between

Angels goes so far as to propose that those poems reveal “the everyday life of average

Americans struggling for integrity and purpose within a maze of shopping malls and billboards” (Muratori, Rev. of Between Angels). While the words “mall” and “billboards” make their appearances throughout his work, Dunn is loathe to give us detailed pictures of malls and billboards. Somewhere between his poetic denial of natural space and his reluctance to launch into a description of the “cold / neon aisles” (45), we find what the poet squints to see in “Slant”:

But then I saw a cow in a room looking at the painting of a cow in a field — all of which was a painting itself — and I felt I’d been invited into the actual, someplace between the real and the real. (Loosestrife 31)

The actual, then, exists between “the real” and “the real.”

187 Dunn’s poems are not placeless, but not painted in full enough detail to earn the

“regional” label Jonathan Holden bestows on Dunn around this time, who called it part of the “poetry of local color” (Fate 34). Many of Between Angel’s poems begin nowhere, with grand abstract titles like “Loveliness,” “Emptiness,” and “Sweetness” which

“comes as if on loan,” dark and bitter and good (44). Still, there exists within Dunn’s abstractions a home, or at least a house. “Tonight a friend called,” he writes in

“Sweetness,” “to say his lover, / was killed in a car / he was driving” (43). And there it is, the poet’s house, the ringing phone, the speaker answering to find his friend’s “voice was low / and guttural, he repeated what he needed / to repeat, and I repeated / the one or two words we have for such grief / until we were speaking only in tones” (43-4).

In the inferred space of home—what he will come to call “a nouny place to live,

/ a firm seat in the balcony / of ideas, while music plays” (Landscape 81), the poet works to understand our limited language of love and loss. “We don’t stop loving because of the difficulties,” Dunn tells us in “Some Reflections on the Abstract and the Wise,” any more than we “eschew abstraction because of the inherent dangers” (Walking 64). The poem “Tenderness,” for example, explores those dangers: “Oh abstractions are just abstract / / until they have an ache in them” and tells us the story of a lover, presumably abused in the past, who experiences gentleness for the first time through the speaker’s hands, and how when the relationship ends, it is the poet who finds himself both “unheroic” and “ floating.”

It is just such an achy sweetness, along with the liberating disappearance of heroism, which yield the discomfort of the optimistic nineties. Middle-class American homes in the nineties might still be comfortable, devoid as they are of efficient angels, might still be lovely, empty, sweet, tender places—excepting the mind’s shadow which

188 harbors fears which no angel seems able to banish. But a few years later, in “The Snow

Mass Cycle,” Dunn’s landscape turns back to the creature comforts of home:

The sky’s murmuring, the storm that calls you up, makes promises, never comes. Somewhere else, no doubt, a happy man slicing a tomato, a woman with a measuring cup. Somewhere else: the foreclosure of a feeling or a promise, followed by silence or shouts. (6)

The storm prompts the speaker’s animal instincts as he daydreams of a domestic shelter wherein the “happy man slicing a tomato” doesn’t yield, immediately to the unspoken threat of the kitchen knife which lurks in Dunn’s earlier work. But this poem too moves to that darker place, that “somewhere else” of foreclosure and argument. In it we hear the kind of threat to one’s security that comes from both without and within.

In foreclosure we sense the danger of eviction, and the way the poem puts pressure on the term, taking on the failure of love, of domesticity, of home. As such the poem reclaims the sound of the slamming door within the word, the changed lock involved in shutting somebody out—the hissing sibilants of “silence” and “shouts.”

The next section of “The Snowmass Cycle” reverses the expansion:

A few days ago I stopped looking at the photographs clustered on the wall, nudes, which had become dull to me, like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks.

I turned away from the view and conjured a plague of starlings. Oh how they darkened the landscape. (7)

The interior space brought to light here is enlivened by the mind’s vision of an outer scene, a paradoxical movement, one which moves even farther within as the landscape grows dark with imagined starlings. The natural world has yielded an inner world, which

189 has in turn yielded the outer world again and suddenly we understand why in a few more years Dunn will come to see that a painting of a cow in a house studying a painting of a cow in a field divulges “the actual.” Dunn has learned from Wallace Stevens how to deduce reality from its appearances: “If it should be true that reality exists / In the mind,”

Stevens postulated in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” “The tin plate, the loaf of bread on it, / The long-bladed knife, the little drink and her / Misericordia,” from all of these things held in the mind, Stevens understands that “it follows that / Real and Unreal are two in one” (414).

In Between Angels Dunn begins to glimpse the double-mirror of art and life and its incongruous reflections, moving from the angel towards a notion of the anti-angel as terrorist, a threat to home and security whom Dunn addresses directly in “To A

Terrorist”:

For the historical ache, the ache passed down which finds its circumstance and becomes the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there’s nothing, not even revenge, which alleviates a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father’s ashes to the wind, a gesture when there’s nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you: I hate your good reasons. I hate the hatefulness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included. Perhaps you’re hating me now, I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular, so smug, it thinks its terror is meant only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,

190 one man’s holiness another’s absurdity. Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I’m just speaking out loud to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse, doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder and, for a while, believed thunder had an ear and a choice. (79-80)

The poem is hopeless, of course, nothing more than an apostrophe, acknowledged by the poet who admits his “old impulse” to speak out is “doomed to become mere words.” By necessity, the poem’s usefulness is poetic. The accentual lines of “To A

Terrorist” lend the “historical ache” of the poem its own poetic historical ache—its four- beat lines implying the poem’s own antiquity, its ancient verse form underlining humanity’s ageless fears and hatreds. Against these stands our artistic impulses, our renderings, the mind working through the world, recalling “the first poet” who “spoke to thunder.” The sibilant alliteration of “historical” and “passed,” then “finds,”

“circumstance,” and “becomes,” whispers against the open-mouthed a’s of the first stanza’s three “aches.” The mouth moves to accommodate the different sounds and then keeps moving, “just speaking out loud / to cancel my silence.” Dunn’s free verse has been called “homely,” and he is widely known as “plain-spoken,” (Baker 224) but his organization of sound is highly musical. Here and throughout Between Angels Dunn provides a sophisticated example of what Jonathan Holden says of late twentieth century free verse, that, in its best moments, it provides “a flexible medley of older prosodies…rich in echoes” (Fate 48).

While the anxiety which engendered “To A Terrorist” predates 9/11 by more than a decade, and predates the Oklahoma City bombing by half a decade, the poem moves with more currency than Local Visitations, his first collection to appear after 9/11.

191 “To A Terrorist” is not the first prescience of disaster in Dunn’s oeuvre, although its tone has changed from one of sheer complicity to helpless disapproval. It has been over ten years since Dunn’s first collection produced “On Hearing the Airlines Will Use a

Psychological Profile to Catch Potential Skyjackers,” in which we heard the speaker’s cheeky response to the news of heightened domestic security. Imagining his own arrest under the rules of such psychological profiling, here is what he says he would do:

“There is no one cause for any human act,” I’ll tell them, thinking finally, a chance to let the public in on the themes of great literature.

And on and on, celebrating myself, offering no resistance, assuming what they assume, knowing, in a sense, there is no such thing as the wrong man. (Looking 50)

These lines, with their sense of playful complicity, their Whitmanian celebrations, are difficult to imagine writing in the twenty-first century. With its focus on literature, humor, self-involvement, the last line nonetheless rings with the weight of something beyond the poem’s drollness. The weight of that something which implicates the self finds its direct voice in “To A Terrorist,” where, among so many discordant, ineffectual poems of the nineties it finds its place. His is a poetry “without hope,” a

‘cancellation of silence” which reveals, if nothing else, the poet’s preoccupation with terror, which is to say the mind’s tangle of fears.

The poem’s hopelessness correlates with the Guardian Angel’s futile corporeal efforts, who—“when the poor are evicted”—tries his best “to stand / between them / and the bank,” even though “the bank sees nothing / in its way” (16-17). As in “To A

Terrorist,” the uselessness of the endeavor need not cancel out the impulse. After all, the question at hand reflects an American perspective on life in a capitalist society grasping for meaning in a post-industrial age that is spiraling towards “Y2K.” It also

192 reflects, in its prosody and futile effort, humanity’s quest to locate in life a meaning and a purpose.

Dunn’s Work and Love takes as its epigraph David Ignatow’s “I am labor, I am a disposition to live.” The questions about discordance, imperfection, and purpose all arise from a poet enmeshed in his decade’s compulsions, including marriage, a mortgaged home, and a profession. From these supposed securities comes the clash of terrorists impossible to stop on the one hand, and angels who prove helpless to protect. Their mutual presence informs the other singular poems of love and loss, and troubles the relative optimism of the book as a whole. Still, the poems make a vibrant life from the supposed formlessness of their poetic form, with Dunn achieving a refinement of line which contradicts his philosophy of imperfection.

It has been said that the book’s closing poem, “Walking the Marshland,” contradicts the penultimate appearance of the Retarded Angel as “barely hopeful,” a “last resort” and in fact offers hope, yielding another way out (Kronen 168). While the final poem offers up a literal place of refuge—Brigantine Wildlife Refuge, a protected coastal marsh not far from the poet’s home in South Jersey—it does not provide a pure antithesis to the book’s ineffectual striving. To the contrary, the sheer refuge of the place is difficult for the speaker to endure:

It was no place for the faithless, so I felt a little odd walking the marshland with my daughters,

Canada geese all around and the blue herons just standing there; safe, and the abundance of swans.

The girls liked saying the words, gosling, egret, whooping crane, and they liked

when I agreed. The casinos were a few miles

193 to the east. I liked saying craps and croupier

and sometimes I wanted to be lost in those bright windowless ruins. It was April,

the gnats and black flies weren't out yet. The mosquitoes hadn't risen

from their stagnant pools to trouble paradise and to give us the great right to complain.

I loved these girls. The world beyond Brigantine awaited their beauty and beauty

is what others want to own. I'd keep that to myself. The obvious

was so sufficient just then. Sandpiper. Red-wing Blackbird. "Yes," I said.

But already we were near the end. Praise refuge, I thought. Praise whatever you can. (110-11)

“It was no place for the faithless,” Dunn laments, feeling “a little odd” amid the natural beauty he had refused as a poetic location in “Beginnings.” But the “arguable” and “perverse” beauty which he claims to privilege might be found here, with Atlantic

City off in the distance, troubling the natural scene with its strange casino skyscrapers and risky allure. And we too feel the tension between the notion of security--“the blue / herons just standing there; / safe”—and those dark places calling to us just a little further down the coast.

To supplant the world’s disappeared angels with the beauty of the earthly world is a difficult task for Dunn, who finds resonance in “craps and croupier” where his

194 daughters like instead the sound of “whooping crane.” The strategy, of course, allows the poet to flash both nomenclatures while claiming only one as his own, allowing the poem a language of natural grace while infusing it with a worldly wink. The words take on a meaning of their own. This is the language of South Jersey, souvenirs for the poet and his family to carry home, artifacts for the reader to re-examine. And while the safety of this place is troubled and difficult to trust, the poem’s sibilant consonants in

“faithless,” “geese,” “swans,” “casinos,” “windowless,” and “paradise,” eventually come to be sharply punctuated by the sharp sounds and sentiment of our “great right to complain.”

Such a complaint stems from the fact that those mosquitoes will rise in summer in a buzzing nuisance, “troubling paradise,” their buzz not unlike the noise of those crickets, bees, and hornets which frequently haunts the poet’s domestic spaces. But the punctuation creates an emphatic rhythmic change which ushers in the speaker’s declaration: “I loved these girls.” That love brings the poem its moment of weakness for the otherwise haughty speaker, for it is a love which puts the world’s danger in acute view. Such vulnerable love at last moves the poet from faithlessness to a sort of desperate belief in this safe haven, even if illusory. “There are no safe havens—for long,” Dunn will come to believe (“Art & Refuge” 24). If it is not God which the poets of the nineties are looking for, they certainly want a safe-enough place in lieu of paradise, troubled as that refuge might prove.

“Praise refuge,” Dunn closes his poem, using one of those wonderfully “open endings” characteristic of the nineties, then adds: “praise whatever you can.” It’s an uncertain edict. It says that something praiseworthy may be difficult to locate, and if located, may be overshadowed by untruths and dangers, while simultaneously suggesting our limited capacity to praise, “whatever you can,” whatever you are able to

195 in your faithless state. Those are the kinds of reverberations which occur in Dunn’s oeuvre when accumulations amass around notions of refuge. The whole endeavor sounds like what one reviewer has called Dunn’s “[determination] to understand the brave attempted union of head and heart and the stunned children such a tryst is capable of producing” (Kronen 168). Dunn’s dumbfounded praise is one of those stunned children, another barely hopeful last resort, flawed, but touching in what it reveals about human desire.

THE MOTH, WILD INSIDE A LAMPSHADE

Sandpiper. Red-wing blackbird. Those birds and their names, spoken by the poet’s daughters in an act of identification, bespeak an old trope. Birds, pen, the same word in Italian, the language in which a host of birds appeared in Dante’s Inferno, surrounding Paolo and Francesca in an ageless symbolic coalescence of love, literature, and flight. For Dunn, desire often assumes wings, wings caught flapping in a domestic setting. In fact, the angel may have come about as an ironic presence in his early work— a form tied to the domestic place, as a ghost, or an insect, whose tiny wings flutter at night.

The moth, forever drawn and burned. Dunn was, after all, a devoted student of

Donald Justice, the poet who gave us those men who, in their mortgaged houses,

“Learn to close softly / The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to.” These men approaching middle-age mute their longing for departure but hear it come in, a wild overpowering noise from outside their windows. “Something is filling them, something” Justice tells us,

That is like the twilight sound Of the crickets, immense, Filling the woods at the foot of the slope

196 Behind their mortgaged houses. (76)

And the sound calls out and rushes in, “filling the woods” with a moat of noise and longing. Dunn’s own dream of running away appears in his “Fable of the Unsharable

Secrets of the Universe” where the sounds of the house, and then of the universe, disturb his sleep:

He couldn’t sleep, the windows were rattling and when he got up to secure them he saw, by accident, all the stars a man with a naked eye is allowed to see… …[his wife] saw her husband disappear down the path they had never given a name. (Circus 74)

Dunn’s speaker fantasizes his disappearance into the unimagined universe, the paths which exist outside of their home about which the couple has neglected to speak.

Dunn’s descriptions of “the unlived life,” it has been said, are as important as his poetic of lived life (Holden Rhetoric 79-82). Although the noise of the rattling windows has supplanted the noise of the outdoor world, it is Justice’s crickets who will resound in

Dunn’s poetic psyche with their immense hum of confinement and dissatisfied desire for the unlived life.

In Looking for Holes in the Ceiling, Dunn gave us an early sense of his own version of Justice’s “twilight sound.” From the start, Dunn has been a conflicted inhabitant, one who resents being housebound and yet craves the strange comfort of those boundaries.

The restless women of “Poem” (10) “listen for the sound of keys” at dusk, the boys dream some quintessential American escape “[imagining] their bones / the chassis for some Buick.” But if one works through this transitional moment of evening, when restlessness and desire strike their clocks, ‘things settle down’:

Soon the manual for living after dark starts to fall from the mouths of mothers.

197 Things settle down, get so quiet you could hear a pin enter the heart of a doll. (10)

Resisting the “loosened celebrations” of possibility which exist outside the stable domestic world yields the quietude of a predictable space. Still, that quietude itself is troubling, another unnerving split, here cleaved by the imagined pin entering the doll, another trapping of the home’s deep, dull, still interior. A cliché like “so quiet you could hear a pin drop” finds that a line break can transform it. This is the unexpected transformation of staying in, the mind working through the cliché of married life, the results keen and slightly disturbing.

When asked to “write something about refuge,”9 more than thirty years after

“Poem” appeared, Dunn fixated on Kafka’s “Hunger Artist.” More than a space sufficiently safe for blue herons in Brigantine, the idea of a self-imposed cage becomes for the poet a place of refuge. In the closing lines of “Poem” Dunn’s moth becomes an adaptation of Justice’s “twilight sound” of crickets, and that winged caged thing becomes an embodiment of the hunger artist himself:

And here and there people are found indoors wondering if the moth, wild inside a lampshade, is ecstatic. (10)

The winged creature drawn irresistibly to the light, ignorant of its own potential demise—a precursor of the angels to come in future decades—reveals Dunn’s own wider conflict: does all this ungainly flapping signal desperation or ecstasy, suicide or art, prison or home? In Dunn’s world, moths flutter like a man pursuing a woman or trying not to, doomed in either case by illumination’s entrapment, just as bees are bound by the ongoing work of their nests, even as they destroy the house in which they live (Landscape 84). The self-destructive poet loves them, because he understands that even hornets are “driven by what they don’t understand” (Local Time 93).

198 These hornets, Dunn realizes, have been “chewing on wood fibers, / transforming them / into a papery home” (Local Time 92). And once the season changes and the queen departs, Dunn and his wife and daughters will grow “brave enough / to bring it inside, examine the emptiness / these papermakers called home.” The poet and father in Dunn must relate to their life of “paper / and service.” From such small things Dunn comes to see into the emptiness of our own industry and the emptiness and clutter of what we call home.

One thinks of Wallace Stevens’ own “the form on the pillow humming while one sleeps, / The aureole above the humming house” (“The Well Dressed Man with a

Beard” 224). Just so, the buzzing insects—Dunn’s hornets, crickets, bees and moths—act as surrogates for the buzzing self. Throughout his work, the poems themselves become empty houses, mere lives of “paper / and service.” The husband and father, drawn to the comforts of the home, vie with the adulterer and gambler, drawn to the world without. And the hum becomes the noise pulling him between domesticity and external excitement: a man’s baser instincts and his crumbling resistance to those instincts.

A LATE CENTURY PLACE FOR US IN AMONG THE SHARDS

In Landscape At the End of the Century those minuscule winged things are at last bound together, where “mosquitoes, dragonflies, and tattered / mute angels no one has called upon in years” come to fill the poem’s atmosphere, the “gifted air” (“Landscape at the End of the Century” 77). Dunn’s preoccupation with the distracting buzz of these creatures appears here too, but countered by an informed optimism. While the collection’s fear of invasion manifests itself in poems like “Bringing It Down” and “The

Artist as Lefthander,” the long poem “Loves" which closes the volume leaves us with a

199 sense of mutual immortality where we as readers and poets, as friends and lovers work out our relationship with each other and ourselves.

But Landscape’s preoccupation with invasion arrives in a more subtle form than it did in Between Angels. “I’ve learned your language,” the poet warns in “The Artist as

Lefthander” (Landscape 36). Like “The Rapist,” the poem ends with a stealthy invasion:

“I’ve gotten in to your workplaces and your homes” (36). But the seemingly metaphorical threat—that of the poet as an intruder—expands to contain a larger peril towards the close of the poem, when he reminds us that “The other side, my advantaged ones, / is always angry, and is not dumb” (36). Thus he evokes the long history of coups d’etats and hegemonic crisis. The notion of the artist estranged from

American society in the cheerful 1990s, further distanced by his left-handedness, feels pitifully small when contrasted with the extreme otherness that exists in the world.

Typically, Dunn handles that rift in two ways. First, the speaker is conscious of the relative smallness of his lament, and when he is not, the reader is alerted to that smallness through often slightly comic touches yielded by the poem’s title or other narrative clues. Secondly, followed to the end, the poem’s seed of terror as planted in the middle class mind yields legitimate terror in the world.

In 1991, Holden, citing Dunn’s “Middle Class Poem,” recognized that the poet understands how “we distract ourselves from the pain, deflect the world’s immediacy by our daily routines of trivial amusements—knowing, all the while, ‘what’s always there,’ but discreetly, in our conscious ‘waking’ lives, averting our gazes’” (Fate 75). In the wake of 9/11, as he divorces and then marries his lover, Dunn’s need to amend pronouncements with apologies becomes overwhelming. It is then that he feels most acutely the disparity between himself and the world around him: “On TV the showbiz

200 of news” (Insistence 78). Turning off the television, wishing it were so easy, the poet dwells on a small moment between lovers:

. . . Last night the roses numbered six, but she chose to wear one in her hair, and she was more beautiful because she believed she was. It changed the night a little. For us, I mean. (Insistence 78)

In the end, he qualifies—this beauty only changing the night “a little” after all—and speaks apologetically—“For us, I mean”—with a self-consciousness that casts the personal into the larger shadow of the political, as the small gestures of lovers become encumbered by knowledge of war.

While such poems work to refigure a broken poetic, putting the line back together after the world has fractured, Landscape at the End of the Century does not yet bear the weight of 9/11’s insinuations. It continues to play, to toy with the world’s destruction as a mental exercise, a negative fantasy. In “Bringing It Down,” the speaker dreams of disaster:

it struck him he was looking at a sky that could hold a jet

and no longer a god. And against decency, for reasons

he didn’t want to know, he began to bring that jet down,

the plane getting larger as it descended out of control,

a fire in the fuselage, then the few lives he’d help save. (37)

201 As with the early ““On Hearing the Airlines Will Use a Psychological Profile to

Catch Potential Skyjackers,” “Bringing It Down” could not be written today in light of the lingering insinuations of 9/11. The speaker’s fantasy, unknown to the world, lives in the secret life of the mind, where the violent daydream is tempered slightly by the speaker’s illusive heroism. Dunn has always allowed the reader to see the worst and best of his humanity, his capacity for violence as well as for generosity, latent or explicit. It is a risky strategy to reveal an often-unlikeable self, someone whom critics have found too revealing: “Every so often Dunn overstates his bid for poignancy, sounding like a guy in a bar who figures his best chance of taking someone home tonight is to prove how he isn’t like a guy in a bar planning how he’ll take someone home tonight” (Kronen 168).

But this guy in a bar rarely enters a bar. Instead, Dunn walks the marshland with his children, makes dinner with his spouse, stands invisible before an unfolding scene.

These psychological landscapes allow Landscape its charms, which are often found in the places the poet touches but refuses to explicate.

In “Midwest” Dunn explores the limitations of place—the way a location dictates one’s way of life. Here he draws from his time in Minnesota as a young professor, about which he writes in his early work, oscillating between an outsider’s capability to study the place with some detachment and his own self-conscious worry about losing his urbane identity, a worry which creeps into poems like “California, This Is Minnesota

Speaking,” (Full 35) or “Boats” and its sense of Midwestern entrapment: “The boats that do not pass my house / take their toll” (Full 34). But “Midwest,” written decades later and framed by its epigram, “After the paintings of David Ahlsted,” makes an effort to include his own midwestern life, now a thing of the past, as a veil to the paintings:

We have lived in this town, have disappeared on this prairie. The church

202 always was smaller than the grain elevator, though we pretended otherwise. The houses were similar because few of us wanted to be different or estranged. (30)

Like Elizabeth Bishop, Dunn speaks most tellingly of a place once he leaves it— the distance allowing him to understand his own disappearance from that landscape.

“When I lived in a small town in Minnesota,” he writes, “I found myself more capable of generosity than ever in my life. […] Everyone in my Scandinavian-American town seemed to have a profound sense of boundaries, which meant that invitations to cross them had measurable poignancy” (Walking 197). And if the romanticization of that place necessitates an outsider’s perspective, Dunn is aware of it, of the news he wanted to take from elsewhere and bring home: “Generosity is a necessary good in sparsely populated, rural areas, and it seems that those of us in more urban environments need to recover a sense that we are dependent on one another” (Walking 197).

Still, the details of place are not painted in Bishop’s watercolors. For Dunn, the memory of living there, like the painting of the place, yields an emotional location from which the planes of the mind find its many metaphors. It’s as though he were working out a life decision, unmentionable, like the thought of betraying his wife, or a wish to leave his home, or just the daily transactions of marriage and work, as he tracks the landscape: “One thing always is / more important than another,” he muses, “this empty street, this vanishing / point” (31).

As he is wont to do, throughout Landscape Dunn gives us those places in outline only, relying on a few select words to conjure the landscape. The man who is “button- downed and wing-tipped, / reading Sonnets to Orpheus in paperback / / at the mall’s

203 Orange Julius stand” (27) complicates the malls of New Jersey, dulling the news that the poet reads:

In the newspaper today it says that the man who robbed a jewelry store

in Pleasantville, crippling the owner, wasn’t happy with his life, was just trying to be happier.

And in Cardiff, just down the road, someone will die at the traffic circle because history says so, history says soon, (29)

The irony of the towns’ names—“Pleasantville” for the tragically unpleasant,

“Cardiff” for the great “if” of driving that deadly “car”—create a place out of language.

The words of South Jersey build the story, but the place itself is rarely the object of

Dunn’s attention. While Vendler claims that Dunn has “[asserted] a need to stay in touch with the local” (Music 441), it is telling that the year Landscape appeared in print

Jonathan Holden wrote that Sydney Lea was writing about New Hampshire and

Brendan Galvin about Cape Cod, Dunn was writing not about New Jersey, but about

“eastern suburban life” (Fate 34). Still, the enlargement is necessary to accommodate

Dunn’s poetic of place—which is a vital, if inferred, frame. About that deadly traffic circle in Cardiff, the poet concludes:

that’s the circle I must take in my crushable Toyota if I wish to stay on the Black Horse Pike,

and I do. (29)

To write about the dangers of the world, the poet starts small. Within our daily decisions lie the hazards of living. Dunn’s particular language of place revitalizes the vast philosophical statement as something precise. Despite the speaker’s fears and the world’s dangers, the final “I do” arrives intact. Dunn works most beautifully in these

204 moments which present the thing itself, moving just so slightly into the terrain of metaphor. Vendler gets at Dunn’s subtle defamiliarization and resulting amplification of common language, when she notes his gift for “[encoding] mystery in speech that remains plain in vocabulary, while doing syntactic and structural justice to psychological complexity” (443). It is not so much an ‘encoding’ of mystery, however, but a highlighting of the already mysterious hidden in plain sight. The wish to continue, to feed one’s desires, is found within the scene implicitly, in the names of the places the poet finds himself, on the Black Horse Pike, in his Toyota, wishing “to stay on,” the echoes of the larger world telescoped within the smaller.

And the nineties were a time of going on. The relative innocence of Landscape permits Dunn the exquisite self-indulgence of the collection’s closing poem, “Loves.”

This fourteen-page poem offers a prototypical longish poem of the period. It starts out as a voice speaking from the void, employing the fiction of intimacy between poet and reader:

I love the past, which doesn’t exist until I summon it, or make it up, and I love how you believe and certify me by your belief, whoever you are, a fiction too, held together by what? Personality? Voice? … (81)

In a familiar shower of sound, Dunn’s sibilant “s” and consonant “t” set up a steep slope down which we slide to the soft, emphatic landing of believe. His line behaves chantingly, not iambically rigid, bound by a softer cadence but driven, as in “To A

Terrorist,” by a two-beat line which demands to be uttered under one’s breath, what

Dobyns calls Dunn’s “idealized speech.” And reading Dunn out loud, best elicits the poem’s adept rhythms (26). “Loves” looks like one long stanza, but is made up of suggested stanzas broken by paragraph indentation.

205 The fictive relationship of the poem’s beginning—literature’s leap-of-faith, mutually creative, which mirrors that of lovers—soon opens up to the bodily intimacy of actual lovers, of spouses spurned by additional intimacies:

When I betrayed, I loved chaos, loved my crazed version of sane. When I was betrayed, I loved fidelity, home. I love more carefully now. But never to have betrayed, admit it, is a kind of lethargy or rectitude, a failure, pure. (81-2)

The poem moves into an imagined sensuality, no body parts or details, no kiss and tell, but the mood is bittersweet and, as elsewhere in the American nineties, pleased with its own faults. In a poem called “Loves,” the poet perhaps has required himself to touch on the subject of betrayal, but without details the subject remains abstracted. The ego which shares such intimacy seeks to do so beyond apology, taking pleasure in being bad. This is the same speaker who admitted to wishing down a plane. Such abstracted betrayal paints a domestic picture in broad strokes, but the small details of home follow, summoning a place out of a few select details:

I love the way my cat Peaches brought the live rat to the door looking for praise. I love his dignity when he seeks company, or turns away. Of all fruits, plums. Of all vegetables, mushrooms sautéed in garlic and wine. (82)

The domestic space inferred, the invisible house surrounds the door where Peaches drops the rat, and the kitchen takes shape where the plums are kept cool and the mushrooms simmer. “Loves” is a selection of singular words, each with a sound and a conjured referent, which builds the poem thing by thing, idea by idea, defined by what takes form as much as by what it leaves out:

I love that a list like this

206 always must extend itself, and must exclude, slash. Loving: such a ruthless thing. (82)

Love’s ruthlessness is an old paradox, made bittersweet by Sappho, who, it has been said,

“invented the lyric meltdown” (Hirsch 22). Where Sappho writes that “Eros the Limb- loosener shakes me again—/ that sweet, bitter, impossible creature” (qtd./trans. by Hirsch

22)—Dunn uses that destructive force as an excuse for his own joy of poetic slashing and personal extensions and exclusions.

But if “Loves” ventures into the too erotic, or too grand, the poem reverses itself, returning to the world of daily things. Side by side, the epic and the domestic assert themselves. Following mention of Thoreau, Jesus, Marx, Malcolm X—the poet pays witness to the lived middle class American life:

I love the just-mowed grass in spring, that good revision, the clean odor of accomplishment. I love the whale I saw in the Caribbean, enormously itself. And the fox who works the woods behind my house, the envy of all of us: deception without guilt. (87)

The suburban lawn, the professor’s vacation, the small woods and its sly, ordinary fox. Around the time Dunn wrote these lines, it is easy to imagine Dana Gioia commending the long or “extended” poem to our nation’s poets. “American literature needs a more modest aesthetic of the long poem,” Gioia believed, and “a less chauvinistic theory that does not vainly seek the great at the expense of the good and genuine” (26).

That Gioia himself was caught up in the self-indulgent nineties provides an interesting problem. His seminal collection of essays certainly sought to vanquish academia’s idealized notion of American poetry, to reduce it, as he says, to something “good and genuine.” Was his championing of the “good” over the “great” themes and forms of

207 literature another celebration of the flawed? Did it suggest, in fact, yet another cyclical move in the history of literature, one which abandoned the intellectualism of the early twentieth century’s High Modernism as we pivoted toward a “low-brow” Post-Modernity at the century’s close? In any case, Gioia’s case for accessibility is engendered in Dunn’s longish poems where the poet seeks and sustains a poetic of the mundane, a poem of philosophy emboldened by the daily arrival of the mail from “the mail-woman, Dorothy, who knows / I live for acceptances / and declarations of love” (92).

When Dunn gives back to us our split feelings about love, he does his job—what

Gioia among others understands as the poet’s primary task—to keep the language honest

(17-18). As such, Dunn’s “Loves” hands us both the easy ubiquity of loving, the state of desire which is human and emerges everywhere we connect with the world, while returning us to love’s ruthlessness and its duplicity: “I love intimacy,” Dunn writes, “and accept / that concealment springs from it, / some partition of the heart / closing as it opens up” (89). One misses the nineties, that time of relative innocence when one could write about the heart and its fascinating concealments. But by then a critical self- consciousness was already welling up in Dunn. In his 1986 review of Dunn’s Local Time,

Liam Rector, celebrating the “infamous holy wedlock of form and content,” felt the need for a parenthetical qualification about his sense of growth in Dunn: “the excitement of a poet (we might have said in less self-conscious times) finding his voice” (503).

But “Loves” is a poem self-conscious in its own right, allowing in sentiment what it highlights as a flaw. In fact, Dunn accepts the flaw, the self’s resistance, as part of love, with its fine, inner failure. “Loves,” in its most discursive movements, seems placeless, the speaker a talking head who relishes conflicting thoughts, celebrates his flaws, and addresses

“Those whom I’ve hurt” with joyful contrition as he explains broadly, “I wanted everything, or not enough; / it was all my fault” (88). It is the poem’s metaphors which hold the poet’s

208 secret life, which is “the secret life / of hornets, famous for their sting, / all day at home making paper, / building a place they must leave” (88). The buzzing insects have echoed their restless noise of work throughout Dunn’s oeuvre, but here the “place they must leave” is named as such outright. The act of departing echoes not our mortality alone, but also

Dunn’s own departure from his family, even that seemingly permanent place revealing its temporality. The poet’s preoccupation with restless departure prefigures the fate which awaits him in the new millennium when he will come to understand that “there are no safe havens-for long” (“Art & Refuge” 24).

The poem thinks it understands what’s coming as the nineties move along; “Loves” closes Landscape at the End of the Century with charm and optimism, and a temperamental irony:

I love to replace God with all things tactile, responsive, and I love artifice, which is a way of being godly if the product is good. And science, its cures and its bomb; I love with a fearful love how far the mind has gone. (90)

To love God’s replacement by material things, to love “artifice” which at worst is false and at best is artful, cheerfully acknowledges our reductions as Dunn tries to make something of the diminished thing which perplexed Frost’s “Oven Bird.” The poem loves what it fears, reacting in awe to what is terrible in the world—the bomb, its dreadful shadow reflecting still a kind of human achievement. And to let go of fear, the anaphora of loving, of making the statement “I love,” continues forth:

Of all insects, the thousand-legger. Of flowers, the rose, I cannot help it, the rose. I love house more than country, country more than space.

209 I love the thing chosen and I love the illusion of choice. (90)

The alternating anaphoric “Of” and “I love” build a rhythmic force. The poem could be endless, the poet warns, but the skillful scaffolding of syntax and word-choice vary the lyrical unfolding. The witty “thousand-legger” as insect is pure panache. The lovely repetition of the rose—“the rose, / I cannot help it, the rose”—the only such repetition of a beloved thing in fourteen pages—yields a melting, a giving in to the world’s clichéd loveliness. The desirous “I cannot help it” moves without further grammatical bridge to that rose, its breathy perfume, open-mouthed “o,” the deep kiss of it, paced to perfection in these short lines. From these fervent sounds Dunn gives us the domestic choice of “house more than country”—in it, the implied need for enclosure, protection—the telling subsequence of “the thing chosen,” and its persistent amendment,

“the illusion of choice.” Of that unfolding movement of the mind, the poem’s associative development could not match the boisterousness of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” with its near stream-of-consciousness, but Dunn’s “Loves” does roll onward, even if only as a single tapered wave to Whitman’s undulating oceans. Still, Dunn’s shifts do appear to arise subconsciously, even if he reveals his preoccupations through his juxtapositions which might otherwise presume to be leaps in subject. “I love house more than country, / country more than space” leads to “I love the thing chosen / and I love the illusion of choice.” From the idea of home comes the illusion of choice. In that shift we hear the poet’s sense of compulsory domesticity. Still fond of heroic striving, however, from where he stands in the nineties this poet cherishes even that illusion.

A few pages later he will reaffirm just such fondness for domestic dissatisfaction:

I love the hour before dinner, cheese on the cutting board, white wine for her, something hard for me. I love the rituals that bring us

210 together when sullenness persists, how the dishes must be done, the children helped toward bed. I love how familiar bodies drift back to each other wordlessly, when the lights go out. Oh we will die soon enough. Not enough can be said for a redemptive caress. (93)

Dunn’s rhyme clusters hold together the poem’s sentences—the r’s and d’s of “hour,”

“before,” “dinner,” and “board,” connect with “her” and “hard.” The following sentence arrives carrying the r’s forward for a moment until s comes to hiss in, all those soft sounds leading back to d when “the dishes must be done, / the children helped toward bed.”

These linking sounds sustain the poem’s forward thrust.

As the poet sketches a domestic evening in its simplest touches, we see the pale outline of a home, along with the ‘persistent sullenness’ of some tension so common it need not even be named. This is one of those evening home rituals which bring bodies close despite an emotional drawing away. Among the poem’s otherwise abstracted philosophical musings, the details are still few and limited, but effective in conjuring a place and its rituals—“cheese” and “white wine” yielding the triply connotative

“something hard” with its mutual hints of liquor, sex, and plain old difficulty. These nightly victuals, in their simplest form, divulge a cameo of a married life.

From that cameo, Dunn induces the greater world, and from his exclusions, the reader fills in the gaps:

I’m withholding things of course, secrets I’ll replay, alone, when my bones get soft. Even you have no place for them, my spacious one, you who have existed to resist me as I’ve made you up. Do I sense you getting tired now? Listen, my truest love, I’ve tried to clear a late-century place for us

211 in among the shards. Lie down, tell me what else you need. Here is where loveliness can live with failure, and nothing’s complete. I love how we go on. (93-4)

Between the speaker’s withholdings (“I’m withholding things of course”) and the beloved/reader’s resistance (“even you have no place for them, / my spacious one”),

Dunn’s place in the nineties is a half-imagined clearing made for the mind for two—two lovers or the poet and the reader—a place away from the cultural excess of the times, for a speaker who sometimes admires that excess. In Landscape the personal comes to play its slight, singular role within the rolling universe, and the poet has worked to find a space

“where loveliness can live / with failure, and nothing’s complete.” It’s a tone familiar to the poetry of the American nineties, and that tinny ring of desolate optimism within a failing, incomplete world strikes here, as the poet ends on the buoyant notion of continuity—“I love how we go on.” Dunn takes a colloquial phrase—“how we go on”— how we do go on; oh, how we can talk!—to bear the language’s greater insinuation of continuance, persistence, and immortality. “I love how we go on,” is archetypal Dunn— the colloquial comment contextualized into profundity.

But the phrase also encapsulates the decade’s self-infatuation as American culture navel-gazes its way into the new millennium. Dunn is not alone in taking up the sentiment of going-on—I think of Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, a work appropriately forty years in the making which finds its right moment in the nineties, boasting a back cover promoting it as “the story not only of one man, but also of the human event on this planet” (San Francisco Chronicle). Snyder’s Patersonesque blend of lyric and epic poem in Mountains which, like Williams’ poem, holds its magnifying glass above its one place in the world, even ends with that bittersweet optimism so characteristic of the 1990s:

212 The space goes on. But the wet black brush tip drawn to a point, lifts away. (154)

Thinking back to Williams leads us to the very seed of nineties optimism, of blossoming survival in a threatened world—Paterson’s “radiant gist” or “Asphodel”’s white flowers capable of growing in the always-menacing landscape of hell, which stands in for the nuclear age of Williams’ lifetime, as well as the poverty of Paterson and the difficulties Williams was privy to as a doctor of the poor. Those flowers stem from a personal triumph, too: one of male domesticity in the Pound era, of Williams’ unlikely marital survival about which he at long last makes the case to Flossie:

We lived long together a life filled, if you will, with flowers. So that I was cheered when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell. (Collected Vol. II 310-311)

Like Williams’ wife, Dunn invites his own “truest love” to the unlikely cheering beauty of a failed, impartial world—one without angels, and threatened by terrorists and bombs. In Landscape at the End of Century the domestic place has moved beyond hell—it is one of shelter, exclusion, and talk, a place which exists not apart but “in among the shards.” There is another world within this one, the poet loved to believe.

“Here is where loveliness can live / with failure”—Dunn closes the door on a century in which “nothing’s complete.” “I love,” he says at last of our survival, of this ongoing conversation, “how we go on.”

THIS LANDSCAPE, LUSH AND EMPTY

213 But the nineties’ ironic optimism reached near collapse after Oklahoma City’s federal offices were bombed in April 1995. In Loosestrife, Dunn’s formerly romanticized

‘place among the shards’ becomes an illusion impossible to maintain: “It makes no difference where one starts,” the poet laments, “doesn’t every beginning subvert / the tyrannies of time and place?” (“Poetry” 69). In what was called his darkest collection to date (Baker 226-7), the old anxieties of collapse, now horribly realized in Oklahoma City, compile in Loosestrife, where the poet’s sense of domestic unrest recalls the eighties’

“Round Trip” where Dunn had written:

One should be alone to build a house of cards. One should have a hardwood table,

perfectly flat. One should have none of the clutter that comes from living a life.

That’s why, though, I’ve been trying to build a house of cards in a house of people—

to do what’s difficult to do and so be pleased with each card I add,

each moment short of collapse. (Local Time 17)

Dunn’s pleasure in working within a “moment short of collapse” predicts his speaker’s joy in the heroic strivings and failed efforts of Between Angels and Landscape at the End of the Century, but “Round Trip” reveals more about the artist’s lists of should-haves than any celebration of those limitations, reveals again what Holden calls his preoccupation with the unlived life. Building a house of cards—a life of art, with time and space dedicated to the pure craftsmanship which Dunn is known to advise10—in a domestic space replete with spouse, children, and things, proves a difficult task against the threat

214 of collapse. And that threat increases with each external pressure as the world presses in.

Loosestrife carries in it the Oklahoma City bombing, and hence its darkness bears the realized weight of the poet’s fears as they have manifested themselves throughout his work. Formerly ghosts of reality or reflexive instincts, those fears and intuitions have taken actual shape in the country he calls home. The invasive purple flower provides a right emblem for the poet whose place, which seemed so familiar, even beautiful in the particular light of the nineties, has revealed itself once more as menacing and strange.

“Pascal,” Dunn writes in the title poem, “even your century compelled you / to feel, ‘We wander in times not ours’” (92). We find the poet still drawn to the unbeautiful of the world. It is the only beauty—“arguable, perverse”—which Dunn allows himself to bring in from the natural world (“Beginnings,” Between 49). But it is a worrisome, menacing beauty, like that of the invasive plant itself—a beauty which arrives in Loosestrife in a particularly frightening form in the long, title poem which closes the collection.

“Loosestrife” worries over the year’s extreme weather—“It was the winter winter never came / to South Jersey; no natural equivalent, / once again, to our lives” (89). Against the unnatural spring, this blooming space of “impatient, upstart crocuses” (90) which makes up the poet’s particular locale, the events of Oklahoma City provide a chastening frame.

This horticultural world suggests something of the terrorist and the correlative dangers revealed in the flowers’ early bloom:

The daffodils and crocuses traveled through the solitude of what they felt toward what they might become. Choiceless, reactive, inhuman— nothing to admire in what they did. (90)

215 And when the poet sees an osprey, “disreputable / as birds go, but precise, efficient,” he envisions “a banker in wing-tips, office-bound, / ready to foreclose” (91).

In nature, a mirror of humanity’s cruelty, any idealism of the earlier part of the decade, is reformed:

The mowed field and the field wild with rockrose and goat’s rue declared themselves as property, ours, no one else’s, and I acknowledged how good the differentiating spaces were between people and people, I, who, years ago— acolyte to an era’s pious clarities— went home to accuse my dear parents of being capitalists. (91)

The adult’s joyful sense of proprietorship held against the memory of youth’s brash idealism reveals the collection’s movement into a hard sense of the world’s failed relationships. Those failures are scarcely celebrated in Loosestrife as they were in Between

Angels and Landscape at the End of the Century. The title poem continues to break Dunn’s deliberate focus on the false paradise of the refuge, his glance now redirected toward the dark shadow at the edge of the landscape: “The marshland gave way to slums / and bright lights,” the poet says of Atlantic City’s appearance on the horizon. “All nature there was human.” It is a human nature about which “the six o’clock news showed the results” (95). But Dunn understands the suburban middle class’s wishful remove from crime and danger, noting the difference between Atlantic City and his tree-lined Port

Republic: “Back here: pitchpine, crowberry, black oak.” And when Dunn and his fellow townspeople protest a shooting range in town, in a poem entitled “The Shooting Place,” where “farm-raised quail” are “let loose like mice / for lazy cats” (95), he knows that

“elsewhere, of course, the quail were kids / who’d gotten in the way of gangs / or their parents’ close-quartered rage,” and he realizes his need to look up from his own

216 relatively un-pressing problem, thus revealing those “representations of guilt” he has become known for (Baker 226).

Loosestrife quivers with realized anxiety and prescient significance. It is in fact apocalyptic: the missing winter weather of global warming, the fires of the Pine

Barrens, the shadows of terror. Although Dunn never works in the full light of contemporary events, Oklahoma City surfaces in the title poem through the world’s

“stirrings of grass and insect,” where the poet’s motif of restlessness here grows deafening as the maddening buzzing reveals “Oklahoma City bereft” (93). The poet

David Baker detected Dunn’s terror of invasion. Like the contagious plant, loosestrife itself, that invader which overtakes a landscape, Dunn’s terror “is of a similar invasion into privacy and coherence” (226). Baker points out home invasion after home invasion in Dunn’s explicit incursions: the vandals who “used baseball bats on the mailboxes, / selectively it seemed, and our house / was broken into while our old, deaf dog / guarded his sleepfulness” (65). Then too there is the invasion of lovers into one another’s “past / / and its inhabitants” (21), and even the moments of self-invasion:

“Some people actually desire honesty. / They must never have broken // into their own solitary houses / after having misplaced the key, // never seen with an intruder’s eyes / what is theirs” (21). The speaker’s sense of disassociation from his domestic space reaches a critical point in Loosestrife. That disassociation is illuminated from the outside by the vandals, from the house of the inner mind by the intrusive lover, and finally by his own sense of distance.

Baker understood that Dunn’s “once-intact household” had come to be

“fractured” (226-7). And while Dunn’s true break from the artificial safety of home is yet to come, Loosestrife exhibits those stress cracks. Here Dunn begins to re-imagine the illusorily safe haven of a refuge, as with the Brigantine Wildlife Refuge from “Walking

217 the Marshland” reconsidered now in “The Refuge.” “This was the safe place,” the poet asserts, “famous for these birds and meetings / of adulterous lovers, everything endangered / protected” (81).

The line break after “endangered” allows that endangerment to hover and emphasize itself. In maintaining its endangered state, the break exposes the fantasy of protection, thus producing the opposite effect of Between Angel’s guardian angel whose optimistic “need to believe” had yielded that solitary line, momentarily true, that

“everything he does takes root, hums.” Loosestrife speaks more directly to the limitations of that refuge and of what it dreams of leaving out: “Turtle Cove was closed / to humans; the dunlin and the swan / acted as if the world weren’t harsh, maniacal.” The world’s tragedies change us, change our perceptions, and thus places themselves are altered by sadness: “Absecon Bay stretched out toward the Atlantic, / the very ocean

Burt Lancaster said— / with the wild accuracy of a saddened heart— / wasn’t the same anymore” (81).

In Loosestrife, the Oklahoma City bombing proves a validation of Dunn’s former anxieties. The poet moves out of the nineties chastened—the imperfect even less sufficient. “Loosestrife,” with its ten sections which attempt to make sense of the world, takes a block form, each section a longish and roughly even stanza. Dunn’s tri-step lyric of the early nineties, with its spacious grace, condenses here into a secure shape, lines huddled together, as a clear narrative progression with its full sentences and sense replaces the relatively carefree, jumping logic of “Loves.”

Not yet the mottled verse which erupts after 9/11, Dunn lets inner rhymes (in the title poem, “acrimonious” resounds subtly in “our own”) and an alternating metrical rhythm, contained within each line, set a narrative form. Nonetheless, at the close of “Loosestrife,” Dunn’s lyric form begins to battle with a growing demand for

218 explication. Baker has told us that at this time “a generation of readers [was turning] to

Dunn for his representations of guilt,” (226) and in “Loosestrife” we see an American poet begin to come to terms with the implications of the relative safety of his insular landscape, his chosen refuge. Now, as his life and locale come under closer scrutiny, the poet attempts to justify, and to revise, his choice of habitation:

At school, because it was his bold time, a home-grown senior hot for elsewhere asked why I stayed in South Jersey. “Because it hasn’t been imagined yet,” I said. Where he saw nothing, I saw chance. But I should have said in flat country friends are mountains, that a place sometimes is beautiful because of who was good to you in the acrimonious air. So hard not to lie. I should have said this landscape, lush and empty and so undreamed, is the party to which we bring our own. I should have kept talking until I’d gotten it true. Something about what the mouse doesn’t know and the owl does. Something intolerable like that, with which we live. (96)

Like an intruder in his own home, Dunn, through his student’s interrogation, looks at his place in South Jersey with discerning, thieving eyes. The poet considers his excuses—that people make a place a home despite the hell of it, as he himself had professed to do in his place “among the shards.” Or, that the landscape of South Jersey is

“lush and empty and so undreamed”—the poet’s defense of place in terms of its poetic value, a place he thinks of as his own where he works in an illusory remove. But with the pressure of the world bearing down, the darkness of Loosestrife cannot end on such an illusion, the way Landscape did. The poet knows he “should have kept talking until I’d gotten it true.” And so the poem concludes with the answer unspoken, an answer the mind is still working out, “something about” the mouse and the owl, the poet surmises, and the ‘intolerable’ terror of the world.

219 Against that terror, the poet scrambles to defend the place he has chosen to reside—or the illusion of having chosen this place, as Dunn might have it. Here in

South Jersey Dunn teaches and cohabitates with his wife and two daughters in their

“unaffordable house,” what he had once called in “Local Time,” “a little bargain with his soul”:

a commitment to the dream

my father lost somewhere between gin and the dotted line.

The siding was cedar. The weathervane gun-metal gray.

It was odd how dinner hour was always approaching,

odd how we counted, what we counted on.

You folded the napkins in triangles, set the prehistoric

knives and forks. It all seemed as if it had happened before. (101)

The speaker’s sense of historical domesticity, the failed dream of his father taken on as his own, leaves a sense of restless duty. The uncanny primal déjà-vu of the set dinner table, the hemmed-in repetitions, the oddness of measuring time with meals and old stabilities—“what we counted on”: these things grow terrifyingly trivial as the cohabitants fold the napkins precisely “in triangles.” In the optimism of the nineties,

Dunn rewrote such domestic unrest as domestic striving. Loosestrife, on the other hand, sees the return of those anxieties, less filtered now by the justifying mind.

“Loosestrife” faces the question about which Dunn’s earlier work remains uneasy— the question of his domestic settling in South Jersey, where he teaches at a local college, raises his children, and cohabits his “unaffordable house” with his wife. And, despite all

220 his years living there, Dunn claims his relationship to place has been mostly “accidental.”

Loosestrife, as bare of particulars as it is, embodies Dunn’s first real efforts to “include indigenous details.” Otherwise, he suggests, his locale merely provides a place for his preoccupations to play out:

All my landscapes, all the localities in my poems, provide occasions for exploring and discovering various concerns of mine: desire, loss, joy, disappointment, otherness, the impingement of the larger world on my little world—the usual stuff. The politics of such. The sentience and ambiguousness of it. Explorations, in other words, in search of attitudes. In the course of such explorations, if I happen to deliver qualities and aspects of New Jersey, that's all to the good. Similarly, one doesn't try to become an American poet. One is because of circumstance and because he finds himself speaking a certain idiom peculiar to his situation and time. (Cortland Review)

While poets and critics have, by varying degrees, long called Dunn a poet of the local, Dunn himself has denied it, providing a caveat to Loosestrife intended for those looking too closely for a sense of region: “if I had thought I was mostly providing local color, I would have abandoned those poems” (Cortland Review). Critics have never quite established a language to manage Dunn’s inferred use of place, his very situated location often drawn in minimal detail, culling local words for their sounds and potential connotations. In “Flaubert in Smithville,” Dunn, through the novelist’s eyes, notes the limitations of region for a writer inclined “to stay in one’s room.” “In the town itself,” the poem goes, “he could see the bare outline / of a form (Local Visitations 71).

Despite the poet’s demurrals of region, one critic thinks Dunn has made poems

“that would move your local grocer (if not your national chain store) to extend your credit indefinitely, for having spoken the local life so well” (Rector 504). And another critic says that Dunn and many of the poets who arose from “the neighborhood culture” of New York in the early twentieth century, were to become, grandly, the “most consciously regional writers America has produced in this century” (Kriegel xxxvii).

221 Dunn, however, insists he lived in New Jersey for 20 years before realizing he had not yet “taken on” his environment: “Most of my landscapes were psychological,” he has maintained (Nightsun).

Of course, the student who understands Dunn’s self-evaluation of his place at the close of Loosestrife is like one of those gulls in his poem “Radical”:

Then the gulls began quarrelling as if what was happening could be a matter of opinion, but they were merely experts, there every morning, not to be trusted. (79-80)

“Home-grown,” Dunn would like to believe this student is a “mere expert” of the local scene himself, “there every morning, not to be trusted” (80). The teacher’s answer to the student yields as much about his poetic as it does about his locale—the either/or of it, the

‘getting it true.’ But that space has not yet been imagined, he claims, or has been bolstered by friends and thus possesses an interior landscape, which, like the speaker in Stevens’

“Snow Man,” sees both nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. But if he has learned anything, it is that he must remind us of the mouse and the owl. Somewhere between the fear of playing the unwitting mouse and the knowledge of becoming the villainous owl, the poet comes to see the unbearable domestic repetitions and crumblings that we bear, the knowledge of the larger world disrupting our domestic peace.

As we have seen, Dunn does not necessarily trust those who speak the local. “Mere experts,” he calls them. The irony of that phrase reveals our own definitions and prejudices, and it is this paradoxical juxtaposition which Gioia sees as keeping the language honest. What do any of us know, really, of the local? The “home-grown senior” of

“Loosestrife,” who is “hot for elsewhere,” exhibits just such an unreliability in his own vision and local knowledge. And despite his local knowledge, the student seems unable to

222 see the place’s ‘undreamed’ appeal. For Dunn, local expertise merely obstructs one’s poetic vision.

THE TERROR OF FREEDOM

But the value of local knowledge will change for Dunn after the attacks of 9/11, when the poet moves from the significance of inhabiting to the significance of visiting—a shift suggesting the metaphysical visitation of human life in this world, emphasized by the terrorist event itself and manifested in his poems by the earthly visitations of the ghosts of nineteenth century novelists, as well as an actual visitation, attributable to his affair and resulting in his divorce and second marriage, a rupture which has resulted in his hovering between two homes: one in South Jersey and the other in Maryland.11 In the penumbra of these events, Local Visitations presents a great break in Dunn’s poetic, thematically, prosodically, and most pointedly through his sudden eagerness to map more specifically the locality of South Jersey. The poems throughout the collection are a fascinating tangle of exerted pressures. Each piece stands against either Dunn’s affair with an ecology writer—a fact which may have heightened his own interest in detailing his environment—or against the events of September 11, 2001, or, ultimately, against his divorce from his wife Lois and his impending departure from his home of thirty years. Dunn himself points to Wallace

Stevens’ comment that “Reality exerts pressure on the imagination” and describes the entanglements of Local Visitations as such:

Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm… all of those were forces informing the poems in some way. (Guernica)

The poet understands the events to be coincidentally linked, ‘backdrops,’ yes, but the ironic confluence of events begs a cause-and-effect relationships at work as well.

223 One review of Local understands that the volume “further [confounds] and

[interrogates] the differences between art and life,” (R. Smith), but Dunn may have sought that interrogation in order to deflect comments like the one Helen Vendler made in 1997: “Some poets just want to tell everything about their divorce,” the critic laments.

''These people are not incompetent, they are just not on my wave length” (qtd. by

Dinitia Smith).

Dunn begins the collection with an abstracted introductory poem, “A Bowl of

Fruit,” which seeks to cast a philosophical filter over the deeply personal pieces in the volume, a defensive underlining of their artifice, the fear of being misunderstood as merely ‘telling everything about his divorce.’ Critics have, mostly, fallen for it. Still, most reviewers sense that something is off here: a shift in poetic, an altered tone. “Long admired for the intimacy and candor of his plain, pointedly spoken lyrics on the quandaries and ironies of middle-class life,” one critic notes, Dunn now “takes a more overtly literary approach” (Muratori, Rev. of Local Visitations). Another notices the ill- placed “Freudian tease” of a locomotive moving through the silence of the sexless bedroom of separating spouses (R. Smith). Other readers have come to Dunn’s defense, ultimately naming his self-obsessions as American, a “loyalty to his private muse” which reflects Emerson’s “highly individualistic, self-reliant "man-thinking" (DeNiord

217).

What Dunn does, however, is to highlight his medium, drawing us into the act of composing, as he now spends “days arranging / this bowl of fruit”, where the “bananas are the shape of bananas” and “the oranges rhyme with oranges” (15). Despite Dunn’s claims to the artificiality of his composition, it is significant that the poet allows for a worm-ridden actuality, where the painting of the still life holds in it the reality of the fruit

224 on the table confronting the artist with its necessity and temptation, even as it begins to decompose:

…And perhaps it’s true that I’ve covered up the worm hole with putty, painted over it perfectly, though this would be a mystery that only can be solved by cutting open or biting into, letting the juices run down the sides of your mouth, or onto your hands. It would be the kind of bold probing I would love for you to love, the final messiness of theory, still life breaking open into life, the discovery that the secret worm, if real, will not permit you any distance. (15-16)

Although the poet permits us to envision the “still life breaking open / into life,” he doubles back once more to draw attention to the poem’s artifice, a still life reaching out through the denotations and images of the words with which he chooses to paint:

But surely by now you’ve come to realize there is no worm, only this bowl of fruit made of words, only these seductions. (15-6).

Recalling the telescoping spaces triggered by the imagined starlings in “The

Snowmass Cycle,” or the painting of a cow in a house studying a painting of a cow in a field in Loosestrife’s “Slant,” “A Bowl of Fruit” reiterates the power of art to conjure spaces in the mind, and the power of the mind to conjure art, where another world resides within this one, as he learned from Eluard. The poem is a gloss on the book’s autobiographical impulses and origins, urging the reader to accept Dunn’s artistic sentiment, pronounced most succinctly in his essay “Degrees of Fidelity,” where he tells us that the “large events in our lives especially have a para-factual existence. When we start talking about them, we are already changing them” (181). Yet, despite the wishful conceit of “A Bowl of Fruit,” the poems of Local Visitations often fail their artistic seductions in favor of what feels like the pressing narrative of Dunn’s emotional state. But that is a risk Dunn has taken in

225 turning his own life into the still life of his verse, where we see both his poetic and domestic landscapes coming under attack from within and without.

In the past decade, the threats to his poetic have multiplied. The moody effervescence of the nineties has come unglued in all realms for Dunn—personally, poetically, and politically. First there is the poet’s wooing of his lover and his new attention to place. Then there are his poems about Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Charlotte

Brontë and Austen, reincarnated in shore towns which come as close to “nature writing” as Dunn is willing to get, and a cheeky bow to his would-be second wife. Then comes 9/11. A native New Yorker, the events of that day brought to life the anxieties of

Dunn’s oeuvre, his fears as a father and a husband, living in the illusory safety of the small town woods of South Jersey.

Finally, Dunn divorces, a fracture reinforced by the events of 9/11, with its multiple ripples of shock, grief, and the resulting sense of carpe diem which led Dunn, and so many Americans, to devalue the futility of the nineties’ ‘heroic striving.’

Certainly the merest sufficiency Dunn has celebrated—since his famous “The Routine

Things Around the House” and that poem’s “incompleteness / that was sufficient” and through Landscape’s “vision of a place where loveliness can live / with failure, and nothing’s complete. / I love how we go on”—must now be discarded (Not Dancing 40;

Landscape 94). In “The Affair”12 he writes: “It came to a choice, and he chose everything.

/ He left almost everything behind" (46). The beauty of the partial and incomplete is forsaken here. Dunn’s break from his marriage and his break from his older poetic forms correlates curiously with the spike in the birth rate the following June—a frantic carpe diem revealed in all those new American babies. In this new wish for wholeness,

Local Visitations foregrounds the contemporary Sisyphean figure who finds himself freed of his burden too late to celebrate the change, as he sees “that his wings / were

226 nothing more than a perception / of their absence,” and finds the sky absent of gods as he “[dares] to raise his fist to the sky” only to find that “nothing, gloriously, happened”

(26). Realizing that same “sad freedom” which Dunn will come to lament once divorced from his wife in The Insistence of the Beauty, his Sisyphean counterpart finds now that “a different terror overtook him” (Local Visitations 26).

The terror of what he takes to be true freedom, then, guides Local Visitations. In

Dunn’s modern figure of Sisyphus we see Dunn himself, getting what he thinks he wants as he leaves “almost everything” behind. The truth is that in “Sisyphus at Rest” we get an unflattering portrait of the divorcé’s transitional life, a state of bachelor disarray:

A small L-shaped apartment. No evidence of comfort anywhere, unless stillness itself is comfort. Even the bed looks Spartan, without give, its one pillow wood.

Books, scraps of notes strewn on the floor to either side of his hardbacked chair. The faucets drip, the dirty dishes have grown mold. (34)

The lines represent the volume’s general loss of lyrical whimsy with their prosaic leanings. The speaker seems to need to give certain details to track this uncomfortable transitional space. A commanding narration overwhelms the verse form, something unusual for a poet who believes in “the para-factual,” and who elsewhere follows the leaps language itself makes, crafting a poetic logic unbound by the facts of the world.

Instead, “Sisyphus at Rest” stiffens into predominant quatrains—like its living space, unlyrical and wooden. Dunn’s loss of his family home of thirty years comes through in the wooden pillow of the apartment, its only comfort the possibility of interpreting comfort there in a space devoid of family, activity, all that striving now abandoned.

227 While the first section of the book offers Sisyphus in this untethered state, floating—in the suburbs in the house, or walking out into a world full of its “cold dark matter” (30), the second part orchestrates Dunn’s failing marriage and new love. Even for the poet who has made marital tension his medium, the poems’ apologetic excuses feel too flat to achieve poetic value: “When their sex turned into love / adultery suddenly felt wrong—the word, / he wanted another word for what they did,” he admits in “The

Affair” (46). Moreover, the poems of new love are awkward undertakings altogether, with the wise poet saying I know better and the infatuated man saying I don’t care. Hence, poems like “She” attempt to match the beloved’s taste to the poet’s aesthetic, trying to sell as an interesting subject her characteristics in what amounts to a personality blazon:

She loved white lilies and a good rain. About such, she was of the many. But she preferred swamps to the postcards lakes could be, the word chardonnay, just slightly, to the actual taste of it. (51)

The poet who once wrote that a poem should only address the natural world if “its beauty / is arguable, perverse” (Between 49), works here to paint the new beloved’s intrigue for the reader, for himself, for his friends and family, to make the case for her unique value which might validate his divorce. In doing so, these poems prove a disastrous break in poetic for Dunn, who has been lauded for his wide appeal in making suburban life a surprising dance. Now a one-sided “She,” the poem forgets Dunn’s often effective lack of detail, the vague truths of his “He/She” of the Eighties, where “she” is another kind of woman who “argues beyond winning, / screams indictments / after the final indictment // has skewered him into silence, / if not agreement” (Local Time 26). The

“She” of Local Visitations on the other hand, closes with the uninspired fact that the

228 beloved adores “afternoon naps and long awakenings”; the telltale epigraph, “For

Barbara,” sheepishly tucked at the poem’s end.

But if the intellectual case for the husband’s departure fails, it is reasserted sexually in the poem “Best.” “Best to have a partner whose desire matches yours,” the poet swaggeringly asserts, “so you each feel there’s no time / to pull back the covers, your respective clothes / Pollocking the floor” (53). The title alone reveals how Dunn has allowed himself the indulgence of the diaryesque. There is no overarching occurrence here, no thought-out schema. Artful construction has given way to the moment, the passionate mutual sense between late lovers that “there’s no time,” no time, in the poem’s twelve- lines, even to make a sonnet, that oldest poetic form for love.

In focusing his attentions on his new beloved in this way, carried away with the actuality of his new life, Dunn forsakes his artful poetic. His often elegantly strung lines become mercenaries of an inflated autobiographical message:

… the beautiful accident of her bra commingling with your sock on a bedpost, and just a stain or two to prove nothing like this could ever be immaculate, Jesus Christ having come involuntarily from your lips, Oh Jesus Christ … (53)

The poet’s trademark wisdom, usually hard-earned by the poem itself—Dunn is after all the one living poet to have attained Frost’s dictum of surprise—is reduced to the short- sighted wisdom of the newly in love, the one who wants to tell about last night’s great sex in sensory detail, its moans which are hardly elevated by the religious overtones.

Which is not to say that this master of the mundane could not produce a splendid sex/death poem. Indeed he has produced many. In “After Desert Storm” (27), Dunn pitted the small and personal against the vaster issues of humanity: “It’s true that victory, righteously pursued / and won, is as heady as good sex with someone / you thought loved someone else.” The conceit there, however, gives way, opening to the logical failure

229 of his metaphor. “The corpses are everywhere,” he sees, but pleasure “should be more pleasurable than this.”

But in “Best,” the lovers’ bed is transformed into a hospital bed as the poem concludes with two aging lovebirds “having died and gone to heaven / and now, amazingly, breathing evenly once again” (53). Before this, Dunn had worked to hone the general, to give us little more than we needed, to conceal what he wanted to keep concealed. The she of "He/She" understood—sans bras and socks dangling from the bedposts—that “you shaped a living space // into a kind of seriousness." That earlier poem was, one critic says,

one of a handful of poems I encountered in the Eighties that convinced me that a poem could dispense with vivid imagery and still be very, very good, that sensory detail is far less important than proportion, rhythm, intelligence. (R. Smith)

Dunn, our poet of proportion, rhythm, and intelligence, who always ordered for us the emotional mess of suburban life, has become disoriented. As he says, the time prompted “some kind of personal cataclysm.” And, while he tries to paint his lover’s portrait in the broken world, he forgets his own command to ‘walk light,’ to “develop a new fidelity, which is to the language and spirit of the poem itself (Walking 109).

As these self-conscious portraits show, Local Visitations is a collection which reveals the growing pains of a refined poet adapting to a new world, a world partly broken and partly revived, in which Dunn searches for a new home. In “Circular,” the little details of comfort enlist desire’s soft “Oh”: “Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm, / some said. Oh for scotch and a sitcom, said others” (19). Here Dunn knows desire lies in the vaguest details, in warmth against the cold, in distraction from difficulty—modern notions of home in which the hard necessity of the burning fire for heat transforms into a preference of a local habitation. Now, finding his world

230 threatened within and without by personal and political events, the poet begins to reconfigure that environment. In abandoning the marriage and domestic life which had long provided his source of creative pressure, Dunn staggers out into the world, freed, only to realize he had “come to depend on his [lost] burden” (“Sisyphus and the

Sudden Lightness” 26).

Before abandoning his home, Dunn cultivates his newfound attention to habitat in the poems in the title section of the book—the anachronistically third and final section of poems in Local Visitations. “It was fun to try to populate my area with these people,” Dunn said. “But more seriously, it was a way of using their sensibilities as a lens for me, to see where I live.”13

The endeavor and the impulse “to see where I live” is a great shift from the ersatz landscape

Dunn painted in the nineties, where an imperfect paradise buzzed with mosquitoes, angels, and terrorists, worldly and gorgeous in its failings. Here the poet seeks to say at last, before departing: “You have found your spot, the place / we all pass many times / until we live long enough to see it” (Looking 29), as he wrote nearly forty years earlier.

The poems of “Local Visitations” attempt to invigorate the towns of South Jersey with a host of resurrected nineteenth century writers. Seeing his long-time locale through these imagined eyes, the poet discovers in the visitor the inexpert eyes required to best see a place, to visualize what Dunn has called “unimagined” landscapes—Leeds

Point, Beach Haven, Galloway. These poems, written before 9/11, are structurally intact and thoroughly envisioned. Their forms take a block-type of stanza, not the airy tri- stepped lines of the nineties, but crafted with a lyric sense of narrative, their sentences clipped for impact. Dunn’s line breaks, too, are alive and careful: “Nothing made him more alert than a large passion,” he writes of “Hawthorne in Tuckerton,” the next line reordering that passion as something “twisted, coiled in the recesses of an innocent”

(93).

231 Still, as one critic notes, even if these poems break new ground, their premise feels at times “a bit like a mere exercise” (R. Smith). An exercise, perhaps, but one of renewal for a poet who has rarely looked outward from the rich dullness of his suburban living room. “I think of mindscape more than landscape historically,” Dunn has admitted. “I think much more about psychological space than I do of place, so this was an effort, but a good one for me to do.”14 Not long before his departure from Port

Republic, the poet at last turns his eye outward to the place he has inhabited for over thirty years. There he sees “Charlotte Bronte in Leeds Point”:

From her window marshland stretched for miles. If not for egrets and gulls, it reminded her of the moors behind the parsonage, how the fog often hovered and descended as if sheltering some sweet compulsion the age was not ready to see. On clear days the jagged skyline of Atlantic City was visible—Atlantic City, where all compulsions had a home. (63)

Specifics of landscape—egrets and gulls, fog and skylines—here trigger ‘sweet compulsions’ which assume a history of place. Where Bronte embodies Dunn’s attraction to relative danger, the comforts of being slightly bad or disobedient in the willfully blind world, Twain provides the prescient vision of America as what it is: unsafe from within. “Twain in

Atlantic City,” which appeared in The Georgia Review in the summer of 2001, concludes with the eerily prescient “No American was safe anywhere, especially here” (83), though the dangers of Atlantic City come from the self, the speaker understanding “that nice people have nasty minds” (83).

Dunn never spends quite so much time hiding behind masks as he does in Local

Visitations, where Sisyphus takes on his divorced persona, and nineteenth century writers allow a frame for the place he has come to call home, a last look around, saved from the sentimental by the fictional use of a persona. In “Goethe in Galloway

Township” the poet tells us “He’s thinking: Oblivion was such a better place / than this, I

232 want to go back. But it’s too late for that.” (84)—the lines echo with a regretful desire which can’t seem to move backward or forward as in a present limbo. And

“Dostoyevsky in Wildwood” continues to articulate the desire which seems a confusion of people and place, where comings and goings first establish then alter a landscape:

Now the people were heading inland to the bars and cafes. He felt the profound loneliness of one who believes we must love one another no matter what. And he sensed an old fradulence, the autocrat in him wishing to lie down with the lamb. He’d stay the summer, if he had a choice. (90)

Dunn’s Dostoyevsky understands how visitations—arrivals, departures—can alter a landscape. So too does “Mary Shelley in Brigantine,” which provides another reformulation of the Brigantine Wildlife Refuge, a motif which Dunn first began exploring in the nineties in “Walking the Marshland” and “The Refuge.” There, the refuge was understood ironically, as half a haven. But here, in “Mary Shelley…” the refuge, through the poem’s fantasy element, enlarges mystically:

Because the ostracized experience the world in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it clearly yet with such anger and longing that they sometimes enlarge what they see, she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls. She must be a sea creature washed ashore. (91)

Here the place achieves its idealized fantasy. The refuge is acutely rendered as “a paradise for gulls”—birds in the afterlife. The slow descent of wings, a golden sun in the reeds: the scene would feel maudlin were it not for the strange disorientation of the speaker, the poem’s premise and its exercise, which allows Dunn to reach its divine culmination. The poet hands this poignant interpretation to us deceptively, through a complicated perspective of foreign vision—neither American nor human nor extant. But the sense of the mask slips away as Shelley gives voice to human impulses and desires,

Dunn’s or anyone’s, in the dream of disappearing. “She loved that in the dunes you

233 could almost hide,” he writes, where “She was almost ready to praise this awful world”

(92).

Disoriented by the new millennium’s many cataclysms, Dunn sheds his predominant husband-persona in both the Sisyphus and nineteenth century writer poems, and conversely loses his predominant mode of talking, his finely-wrought line, in these divorce and new love poems. His trademark domestic tension must necessarily evaporate now and transform as he divorces, remarries, and relocates. In 1984 Dunn had tried to reject any fantasy of elsewhere, writing of Tangier: “There’s no salvation in elsewhere; / forget the horizon, the seductive sky. / If nothing’s here, nothing’s there.”

The villanelle form had shaped the poet’s obsessive resistance to elsewhere’s seductions

(Not Dancing “Tangier” 65). But now Dunn disembarks with a broken poetic, a broken home, and a broken birthplace, finally giving in to the temptation of elsewhere’s seductive cries, as he hears once more the sound of keys at dusk as did those early women of “loosened celebrations” in the poet’s earliest imaginings.

THE INSISTENCE OF BEAUTY

Somehow, the shattered poetic of Local Visitations comes to be roughly reformed in

The Insistence of Beauty, as the poet arrives at his “sad freedom,” a significant term which, while applying to his divorce, reverberates between that personal usage and the American political rhetoric centering around “freedom” after the fallout of 9/11, including the creation, for instance, of “The Patriot Act.” Insistence includes “Juarez,” in which Dunn recites an autobiographical story belonging to his ex-wife, Lois, who had forbidden Dunn writing about it while they were still married: “What sad freedom I have,” the speaker mulls, “now that we’re unwed” (34). No longer bound by their marriage, the poet exposes her once off-limits tale.15 Such ‘sad freedom’ also reveals Dunn’s attitude about friends

234 and family, and the limits such figures might offer as a not-unwelcome reining in. When asked in April 2001 if winning the Pulitzer for his collection Different Hours might change him, Dunn answered:

I hope not. It might change a few things. I think one of the advantages of winning something like this and being... is being my age, where my habits are in place, my friends are in place; all the things that limit me are very much in place so that I imagine certain... there will be certain opportunities for me that were not there and opportunities for the work itself that were not there before. But in terms of day-to-day living, I suspect not too much will change. (PBS’s Online Newshour)

One wonders what “in terms of day-to-day living,” Dunn imagined the Pulitzer might have changed were he younger or without habits and friends to ‘limit’ him. As it turns out, a year later he would leave his wife. Still, the cash award does not promise much by way of lifestyle change, certainly not enough to obtain that fast sports car Elizabeth Bishop bought with some of her own literary money received from a story printed in The New

Yorker in 1953—an MG which she couldn’t drive (One Art 273-4; 279). I wonder if Dunn is imagining something precarious about the award itself, something which might cause him to abandon his dedicated habits, the danger of resting on his laurels—the perils of the sated suitor, such idleness which indeed came to threaten Local Visitations when his mistress became his wife.

That same emotional instability threatens Insistence. “On the whole,” one reviewer writes,

Dunn seems to float above his poems. When he writes in the second poem of the collection that the blank page has asked him to be filled with "all the travails of Love," it's not only the puffed-up idiom which sounds off key: that conceit is the poet's way of telling us that the whole book will be about leaving his wife. Even when the poems show a sense of culpability, there's always this same smarmy air of self-absolution. The effect is, well, creepy. (Campion)

Despite its interpersonal ‘creepiness,’ Insistence continues to find in poetry a necessity— as its title suggests, an insistence—of sorting out visions of beauty and

235 viciousness in the post-9/11 world. Peter Schjeldahl’s quote opens the book: “It is always too late to argue with beauty . . . Beauty isn’t nice. Beauty isn’t fair.” Dunn interrogates a complicated beauty in these pages. He is not quite the earlier poet who sought beauty in nature only if it were “perverse, arguable,” but one who explores how the world impresses a certain kind of splendor on the mind before knowledge can alter those impressions, or in spite of such para-factual altering:

The day before those silver planes came out of the perfect blue, I was struck by the beauty of pollution rising from smokestacks near Newark, gray and white ribbons of it on their way to evanescence (86).

Like Williams’ pastorals which gloss Paterson and Rutherford’s urban and suburban landscapes, Dunn seeks the world in its complications, in how we come to understand our place through language: “I never know what to say after someone says

‘that’s beautiful,’” Dunn has claimed, “except to agree with them” (Cortland Review). But the beauty of Insistence is not one of automatic agreement, familiar and facile as a sunset, but rather a dangerous one: “those silver planes” emerging from “the perfect blue,” the mind’s eye elegantly imaging the terrorist act—like the pollution over Newark. Our knowledge of the world and our glorified vision of it, Dunn says, are in conflict.

Such conflict guides the poems of Insistence, where Dunn is out to renew his sense of home amid the chaos, just as Williams did when he reminded us in “Asphodel” of those flowers which can grow even in hell, and just as Stevens did late in life, allowing himself the indulgence of place in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” finally attaining a sense of nativeness in his adopted home: “It is not that I am a native but that I feel like one” the poet announced just a few months before he died (895). Not surprisingly, Dunn’s own near-nativity in South Jersey—his final depiction of that place

236 he called home before 9/11 drove him to revise his affections—reflects a tradition of defrayed American Modernism, having been influenced most by those poets—Frost,

Stevens, Williams—who stayed in America with ambivalent attitudes regarding their locations.

Like Frost, here is a poet of domestic tension caught in a house always atrophying. Poetry, as Frost’s “Directive” instructs us, can supply again “your waters and your watering place,” and this is why, perhaps, Dunn gives us a new center for the house in Insistence. His first collection to be wholly covered by the shadow of 9/11 reveals a home not built around the age-old fireplace with its necessary function of warmth and ambiance, but around a “stairway going nowhere,” a Dadaist contraption which here in the new millennium might replace the hearth as the living center of the home:

The architect wanted to build a stairway and suspend it with silver, almost invisible guy wires in a high-ceilinged room, a stairway you couldn’t ascend or descend except in your dreams. But first— because wild things are not easily seen if what’s around them is wild— he’d make sure the house that housed it was practical, built two-by-four by two-by-four, slat by slat, without ornament. The stairway would be an invitation to anyone who felt invited by it, and depending on your reaction he’d know if friendship were possible. The house he’d claim as his, but the stairway would be designed to be ownerless, tilted against any suggestion of a theology, disappointing to those looking for politics. (13)

The stairway, like beauty itself in Insistence, hovers beyond purpose, beyond artistic value—a personal construction. This stairway dangling from “silver, almost invisible / guy wires” hangs in its practical atmosphere—a dull house “built two-by-

237 four by / two-by-four, slat by slat”—a thing without function. This is not a stairway for the souls of the victims of 9/11 to ascend, nor a comment on the impossibility of upward mobility in America, nor even a reminder that the weight of our bodies is not always easily borne by our ideas. It is none of these things, but “designed to be ownerless, tilted against any suggestion of a theology / disappointing to those looking for politics.” “Of course,” Dunn understands, “the architect knew”

that over the years he’d have to build other things the way others desired, knew that to live in the world was to trade a few industrious hours for one beautiful one. Yet every night when he got home he could imagine, as he walked in the door, his stairway going nowhere, not for sale, and maybe some of you to whom nothing about it need be explained, waiting, the wine decanted, the night about to unfold. (13-14)

The poet’s useless stairway is a thing not of beauty, then, but a thing made ‘in a beautiful hour.’ It goes nowhere and is not for sale—a kind of evidence which provides, as Dunn says elsewhere in the volume, “continual proof / you’ve been alive” (18).

Against Dunn’s oeuvre, this stairway offers the idea of escape which never seemed to materialize in his longtime domesticity. “We are unable to sleep,” he had written as far back as 1974, “in these houses made by someone else, these furnished rooms we come to” (Looking 35). Restless in these rooms built by others, these already furnished stanzas, a new couple, like a poet and his reader, must invent a stairway of the imagination, which, even if unused, must be imagined and tolerated.

The invented stairway which hangs between lovers—or between poets and readers, a nuance which bears Dunn’s longtime conceit of fidelity—becomes the couple’s conversation piece, although perhaps “nothing / about it need be explained,” as in an artistry understood. While his early carpentry poems had dreamt of an

238 architectural poetic, Dunn had once worried that a house’s expansion might cause too much distance, as in his ironic “Fairy Tale,” in which wife and children want their own wing:

There was a small house that existed and a wing to that house which didn’t. And he had made promises about space and had once said something about privacy, which everyone in the house understood to be their own. But the wing was not just a wing, it needed a foundation and a roof and most of all it needed money so he told them wings are for the rich, there would be no wing this year. This was when the children wept and reminded him of his promises, and his wife said she couldn’t live without a wing, a wing was what she dreamed of those nights when the house was so small around her. So his wife took a terrible job typing the afterthoughts of those with many wings, and the money was green and full of plaster and beams and so many windows. That was how the wing the children call their own was built and how the distances in the house grew larger. He sits in his room now, the one on the other side of the house and his wife sits in her room and there are hardly any accusations. (Work 60)

In its mix of architectural annex and flight, “wing” is defamiliarized through its syntactic isolation and its many repetitions. Removed as it is from any antecedent, the desired wing’s absent presence puts a magnifying glass to how language reveals cultural desire and shifting priorities. From angelic flight to earthly greed, Dunn’s early poetic engaged idea and song at once, through pacing and surprise. Line breaks add to the drama: “and his wife said she couldn’t live,” while repetitions allow for a chiastic pivot of syntax: “without a wing, a wing was what / she dreamed of . . .”

239 Thirty years ago, Dunn was a man who understood that “hardly any accusations” made for a dull marriage, and that unfed desire and the tension of home life proffer a muse. For the early Dunn, that tension provided insight into the self, and offered up, sporadically, the joy of cohabiting. “A successful happy marriage poem, like a happy marriage itself, is a triumph over the unlikely,” Dunn has said. “You must write it with the inventive care with which you would write science fiction” (Walking 145). That supra- ordinary genre, the happy-marriage poem, rose up occasionally for Dunn, as in “I Come

Home Wanting to Touch Everyone”:

The dogs greet me. I descend into their world of fur and tongues and then my wife and I embrace as if we’d just closed the door in a motel, our two girls slip in between us and we’re all saying each other’s names and the dogs Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs, people-style, seeking more love. I’ve come home wanting to touch everyone, everything … (Work 64)

Out of that “world of fur and tongues,” where the poet-husband located corporeal joy and comfort, Dunn now finds himself some twenty years later with his girls now grown and the house deserted. The poet strings his stairway up, an inanimate creation too cerebral to replace those loving bodies. From this long perspective, the stairway feels sterile, removed from the once-tactile “world of fur and tongues.” It is something on which the poet is working with his new wife: a dream of change, as impossible as might be the ascent. As such, the stairway provides another defense of the personal compulsions of his new love poems, where, on its floating steps, we find the new millennium’s interpretation of “art for art’s sake,” resistant as that art might be against capitalism and religion and personal circumstance, which we know cannot be all that

240 resistant. And yet, there it is: this stairway of American art, hopelessly defiant against the outside world.

But that outside world, which Dunn early on had sensed “pressing in,” has now become inescapable. The house, the personal domestic space from which the daily news had once arrived intrusively but at a distance, has now been directly impacted by that world, split without and within. In “The House Was Quiet,” Dunn transforms Stevens’ meditative anaphora into a sulking crescendo:

The house was quiet and the world vicious, peopled as it is with those deprived of this or that necessity, and with weasels, too, and brutes, who don’t even need a good excuse. The house was quiet as if it knew it had been split. There was a sullenness in its quiet. A hurt. The house was us. It wasn’t a vicious house, not yet. We hadn’t yet denuded its walls, rolled up its rugs. It had no knowledge of the world and thus of those who, in the name of justice, would ransack belongings, cut throats. Once the house had resounded with stories. Now it was quiet, it was terrible how quiet it was. And, sensing an advantage, the world pressed in. (29)

Stevens’ once-quiet house and calm world, in the momentary peacetime following the end of World War II, has been transformed under the pressure of Dunn’s nearer calamity. The quiet house, a newly American kind of home, “quiet as if it knew / it had been split,” echoes both the terrorist event and Dunn’s personal divorce, aggrandizing the personal while making personal the broader tragedy of events, the fact that we are hardly safe from the terror and terrorists of the larger world.

And though the inhabitants of this house “hadn’t yet denuded its walls, rolled up its rugs,” they will, for “Dismantling the House” is the next poem to appear:

Rent a flatbed with a winch. With the right leverage anything can be hoisted, driven off.

241

Or the man with a Bobcat comes in, then the hauler with his enormous truck. A leveler or a lawyer does the rest;

experts always are willing to help. The structure was old, rotten in spots. Hadn’t it already begun to implode?

Believe you’ve just sped the process up. Photographs, toys, the things that break your heart—let’s trust

they would have been removed, perhaps are safe with the children who soon will have children of their own.

It’s over. It’s time for loss to build its tower in the yard where you are merely a spectator now.

Admit you’d like to find something discarded or damaged, even gone, and lift it back into the world. (31)

Dunn struggles to maintain his form with these tercets redolent of earlier days when a house could be built of words, not of the necessities of conveyance and urgencies of self-excuse for a departing husband. “In the Land of the Salamander” for instance, the poem opens with the uninventive: “Salamander land, we called that island

/ where we’d gone to do damage to our routines” (74), or the private joke of “The

Anniversary of the Rain and the Rule,” in which the speaker celebrates an anniversary of lovemaking—“and now the anniversary of that day / in which you came round has come around” (71).

Dunn has often made great use of the repetitions of speech in order to highlight a telling disconnection between one meaning and another, as in “Loosestrife”’s “It was the winter winter never came / to South Jersey (90), but “came round” and “come around” juxtaposed as they are, illuminate little, the gesture merely reflecting an old

242 reflex. Dunn might indeed be capable of writing a sexiversary poem, but he is still too close to the subject, with a budding desire to impress the wooing lover with his old tercets he fails to attain the kind of wrought line and wit which would have prevented his writing a line such as the unfortunate, “when you slipped, in all senses, into my life”

(70). The trochaic rhythm of “rent a flatbed with a winch,” on the other hand, gets back into the rhythms of fantasizing the tragedy into art as it transforms the world of experience. “How difficult is it to publish such personal poems about the dissolution of a relationship?,” the poet was asked, to which Dunn answered:

Somewhat difficult, but it’s always been the case for me that I don’t let a poem go into the world unless I feel that I’ve transformed the experience in some way. Even poems I’ve written in the past that appear very personal often are fictions of the personal, which nevertheless reveal concerns of mine. (Guernica)

“Dismantling the House” with its “fictions of the personal” in its representations of the destruction of a home, while telling something about the great tower of loss, does not “tell everything about [the poet’s] divorce” as Vendler fears. Once more, Dunn speaks for a larger audience, his personal tower inferring those greater towers of loss in the destruction of the Twin Towers. While the poem’s literal dismantling attempts to realize the fracturing divisions of divorce, the hoisting off by haulers and enormous trucks returns us to the clean-up of the World Trade Centers, a connection solidified in the poem’s final stanza, where the speaker is a rescue worker’s doppelganger, asking himself to “Admit you’d like to find something / discarded or damaged, even gone, / and lift it back into the world.”

The capability of lifting back into the world something gone is again dreamt of in the collection’s title poem:

When word came of a fireman who hid in the rubble so his dispirited search dog

243 could have someone to find, I repeated it to everyone I knew. I did this for myself, not for community or beauty’s sake, yet soon it had a rhythm and a frame. (87)

In this awful and moving anecdote, beauty finds its insister, first in the dog, then in the fireman, and finally in the poet himself: a heartening story rising from the disaster, something repeated “for myself,” which opens out to the community at large. “Literature at its best is communal,” Dunn has said, and while many of the poems of Insistence “were written out of a certain personal urgency,” it is the rhythm and frame which the poet wants to cohere here. “I’m always conscious of myself as a maker of poems,” he has said, and thus to some degree a fictionist” (Guernica). And while that artful rendering comes to be threatened by the cataclysmic events of 2001—events personal, political, but all in the broadest sense, domestic—Dunn, our poet of American heritage and that rare breed of male domestic poet that Vendler had us watching for eruption, has had to reconfigure his poetic.

Historically a poet of restraint, Dunn’s sense of prevailing “personal urgency” troubles the poems even as he attempts to reshape his crumbling poetic. Trying to build a familiar shape around himself, to cobble together a safer haven, the poet grabs at various forms, borrowing throughout the volume from various wellsprings, including Stevens’ “The

House Was Quiet and the World was Calm,” as well as the traditional form of the villanelle for his poem “Grudges” and Mark Strand’s “Elegy for My Father”—which Dunn appropriates as a back-and-forth between himself and his ex-wife in two separate poems, each entitled “The Answers.” The first poem by its title reveals the ambivalence of the departing husband:

Why did you leave me?

We had grown tired together. Don’t you remember? We’d grown tired together, were going through the motions.

244

Why did you leave me?

I don’t know, really. There was comfort in that tiredness. There was love. (42)

The format, which continues to repeat roughly the same italicized question, allows the poet to—“hopefully arrive at a more substantial answer” through its insistent probing. Claiming he needed from Strand “the distraction of a formal element” in order to reshape his sense of personal urgency into fiction, Dunn doesn’t highlight the fact that his imitations are in fact mimetic shadows of a death poem (Guernica).

Paralleling his marital crisis to one of mortal loss—in Strand’s elegy the italicized lines are responses from the speaker’s dead father—Dunn again stresses his own sense of loss.

These borrowed forms and their useful constrictions, however, do help the poet to maintain something of his usual structural integrity, but Dunn’s effort to parallel personal tragedy and national disaster grows more and more tenuous. In “Grudges,” a poem which appeared in Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, Dunn attempts to reorder the world, to find his way between poetry and the emotion of cataclysmic occurrence. As an old sense of disaster is realized here in America, the poet turns to the protective form of the villanelle, with its repetitions suited to a preoccupying problem:

Easy for almost anything to occur. Even if we’ve scraped the sky, we can be rubble. For years those men felt one way, acted another.

Ground zero, it is possible to get lower? Now we had a new definition of the personal, knew almost anything could occur. (40)

As Dunn considers the sentiment of the terrorists, men who “felt one way, acted another,” the unfaithful husband considers the idea of empathy in its broadest sense. We

245 hear once more an echo from his “On Hearing the Airlines Will Use a Psychological

Profile to Catch Potential Skyjackers,” where the coy speaker says “there is no such thing as the wrong man.” Here empathy emerges not directly, but through a self-obsessed linking of shared deceitfulness. Dunn recognizes in these men who “lie low while planning the terrible, / get good at acting one way, feeling another,” (40) his own duplicitous life as a cheating husband who is preparing to leave his wife:

It just takes a little training to blur a motive, lie low while planning the terrible, get good at acting one way, feeling another. (40)

The parallel is a dangerous one, of course, for the conflation of these two disparate events cannot hold. As in “After Desert Storm”—where the victory of war is made (in)congruous to “good sex with someone / you thought loved someone else,”

“Grudges” tests whether or not the language itself is capable of bearing out such conflation, as the villanelle’s repeating third line comes to be reincarnated as “the useful veil / of having said one thing, meaning another.” But the missing body of the final stanza, while horrifying in the light of 9/11, shrinks to the size of the absconded husband, then finally flickers forever irreconcilably between the two:

Before you know it something’s over. Suddenly someone’s missing at the table. It’s easy (I know it) for anything to occur when men feel one way, act another. (41)

The parenthetical “I know it” rings of Bishop’s “Write it!” in “One Art” and Dunn borrows that great poem’s fluency of loss in which Bishop builds a schema to sort loss by size, from the smallest object—keys, a watch—to the largest—cities, a continent. But the poet’s classification falls out of order as the body of the “you” appears in the final stanza, physically small, emotionally vast, the loss of the beloved breaks the poem’s system to expose the underlying deceit: “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I

246 shan't have lied” (Complete Poems 178). The lie of emotional suppression revealed, Bishop’s loss too, like the missing person of “Grudges,” bears both the possibility of mere break-up or the darker reality of her lover’s suicide in New York City in 1967 (One Art 467-74). The poems’ disasters are personal and corporeal, but ultimately Dunn’s “Grudges” moves us from a vast public disaster (while dwelling uncontrollably on his own personal crisis of divorce) to the physically small, lasting grief—the loved one disappearing from the daily routine.

9/11 casts its shadow throughout Insistence as Dunn tries on various poetic containers in an effort to hold the uncontainable. Love poems and divorce poems alike fall under the shadow of the terrorist event, and even storms take on a sinister quality.

In “Something Loveless Out There,” the lovers’ bodies are changed, “differently alert, / as if aware of something loveless out there”:

Come morning power lines were down, everything crusted and slick, the driveway impassable. But there we were, alive, unhurt, and I remember how in silence, not awe, we noted destruction’s strange beauty, determined to give it nothing more than respect. (60)

Even lovers tucked away in their beds feel it, the vague threat of the world with its terrible beauty. In this case a perilous storm, not a terrorist event, threatens a domestic peace. Even so, the storm contains a new malevolence, entwined as it is with its era.

As the poet begins his cohabitation with his new love, grand worries of the outside world compete with small anxieties about sentimentalism, and the volume comes a little to its senses, worrying over those maudlin poems of Local Visitations, “Is it possible to be in love / and wise at the same time?” he queries now (“Beliefs” 57). Poems for his new wife grow more interestingly difficult and comic: “Love-Lies-Bleeding” shows a nagging lover

247 chipping away at the name of the flowering plant, as he tells his new wife “who takes plants seriously”:

Isn’t Love-Lies-Bleeding comic, like midlife crises to those long past them? The name, I mean, isn’t it funny, like B movies, the dialogue purple as a giant bruise, all the characters actually saying out loud what they think? (32)

As Dunn recovers his comic tone in these love-ish poems, his poetic starts reforming.

The rhythms and stresses of a musical rolling along are made speech-like by the asides,

“I mean.” Insistence holds fewer flat lines and nonmusical movements as a whole, and the impulse to explain his romantic situation has deadened as times passes and his new love settles itself into a routine, where spats occur and new tensions develop:

No, I don’t think it’s funny, not at all, she said, and laughed the way I’d seen good actors do in lieu of what they felt. It was time to stop talking about it, I was sure. But I continued on. (33)

More surprisingly than these developing tensions, perhaps, is how poems involving the poet’s ex-wife Lois come to acquire a poignancy, as the poet steps into the future with one eye cast longingly back at his former place. When Dunn appropriates his ex-wife’s personal anecdote in “Juarez,” he tells it as a love poem for the now-sundered couple.

Admittedly, he confesses, this is an “edgy love poem to my ex-wife” (Guernica):

But, after all, it’s my story too. On that dark Juarez night, every step of your troubled descent was toward me. I was waiting in the future for such a woman. (37)

A post-love poem, “Juarez” is followed by another poem for his ex, one of the

“I’m-sorry-I-broke-your-heart” variety. “Good Dinners” hands up the dinner table as a microcosm of the marriage, with a telling epigraph: “Despair is perfectly compatible/

248 with a good dinner. I promise you. — William M. Thackeray.” The poem tests

Thackeray’s theory, making poetic the mundane, which is Dunn’s celebrated gift:

I loved your risotto, your coq au vin, the care you gave everything you prepared. I loved even your meat loafs and stews. You, of course, couldn’t love what you’d done; the true maker never can. Those arrangements on the plate: still lifes designed to disappear. In a certain mood, one could say you provided experiences that foreshadowed loss. Too cruel, I know, but you made me want more, and I consumed and withheld. Rumaki, stuffed grape leaves, I praised the talents you were sure of— what almost no one yearns to hear. You kept track—x’s next to things you thought we wouldn’t want again. I was always present, always somewhere else. No wonder I didn’t realize until now how much despair must have been yours. (38)

Absorbed in these retrospectives of familial life, Dunn revises the scene to his poetic disadvantage, often taking on a grand kind of self-excuse as he did in Landscape at the End of the Century’s exquisite long poem “Loves,” where he wrote: “Those whom

I've hurt: / I wanted everything, or not enough. / It was all my fault” (87-88). That grand figure who “wanted everything, or not enough,” now makes another attempt at empathy, confessing he was “always present, always somewhere else.” In these poems for his ex-, for the past, Dunn begins to reclaim a poetic music, more austere than those romanticized failings of the nineties. The inherent music of “risotto” and “coq au vin” gives way to the somewhat inferior open vowels and sibilant hisses of “meat loafs and stews.” Dunn’s growing wisdom is for shifts in subjects as well as sounds—the details of dinner giving way to the broadest idea of art: “You, of course, couldn’t love / what you’d done,” the poet says knowingly, thus linking the housewife to the artist, “the true maker never can.”

249 And if art isn’t a sufficient aggrandizement of tonight’s dinner, Dunn reads the meals further, precisely as what they are, which is Dunn’s gift for locating the intrinsically evocative: “Those arrangements on the plate: still lifes / designed to disappear.” That the meals are presented as acts of disappearance, as “experiences that foreshadowed loss,” reveals how far the poet has developed his close reading of domestic life, especially now as he stands apart from it. The special tension of domestic turmoil and good food perhaps belonged to Dunn and his first wife. Married now to an academic, the unusable stairway hangs as a symbol in their unadorned home—a home made of ideas. “Good Dinners,” on the other hand, reveals the intellectual mind confronted with the mundane experiences of the family dinner table—exposing the good inherent in one’s daily life and suburban rituals.

Such poetic refinement from the daily world allows Dunn to move from “Good

Dinners” into “The Past,” a poem of nostalgic longing secured beautifully by the stunning image of those fish who glow after death:

Herrings begin to glow just after they die, never while alive. When I read this I wanted to sit for a long time in the dark. Nothing in nature is a metaphor. Everything is. I thought both thoughts. And knew inexactly why I felt sad. Herrings dead and aglow— I should have been properly amazed, the way anyone looking at a star would be, realizing it was years away, untouchable. Yet there it is, shining. (39)

The poem, however vague compared to the details of “Good Dinners,” is bolstered by the many retrospective poems of the collection in which Dunn reflects on his life with his former wife with tenderness and regret. The speaker’s qualification—“I should have been properly amazed”—attempts to loosen the poem’s nostalgia, to imply his distance from

250 the romanticization of the past, which, purported distance withstanding, calls him back,

“shining.”

As though to hide from that glimmering past, Dunn includes a number of wish- to-convince love poems à la Local Visitations, most of them weak. “Monogamy,” for example, addresses his new efforts, with some self-encouragement needed: “Start again, try to say it / with a little brio this time,” the poet coaxes, “a dash / of wasabi in the first sentence” (64) trying to persuade himself of “the suddenly desirable / mono in monogamy to celebrate, / the new freedom of wanting / only one person” (64).

“Achilles in Love” borrows from a mythological weakness: “He wore sandals now because she liked him in sandals. / He never felt so exposed, or so open to the world”

(67). His need for self-convincing, for aggrandizing, seems to cover up the deeper subconscious rumblings of Janis Joplin’s voice roaring “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” or Bishop’s regretful “Questions of Travel,” a more direct form of

“Juarez”’s ‘sad freedom’:

Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be? (94)

Like “Tangier”’s “if nothing’s there, nothing’s here,” Bishop gets at Dunn’s human fickleness—our desire to change, to go, counteracted by our need for sameness, our regretful desire to go back, even if—as Bishop suggests with her “wherever that may be?,”—even if it means going back to the nothing that was not there, as Stevens’ “Snow Man” might name it.

Despite its impulses, however, The Insistence of Beauty does not try to go back. What the volume shows is Dunn’s difficulty in adapting to a world which has changed and so changed him. He clings to forms in an effort to return shape to his world: the form of influence in

Stevens, of fellowship in Strand, of tradition in the villanelle, and in the old-timeworn and

251 familiar form of love between himself and his ex-wife. He struggles, prosodically and emotionally, to give his stories “a rhythm and a frame.” Set against the calamity of 9/11, the affair, divorce, and the poet’s relocation, Dunn reforms.

HERE AND NOW

While the nineties found Dunn at the height of his poetic form, where a bittersweet tone met an airy tri-stepped pacing, by the time his Pulitzer Prize-winning

Different Hours appeared in 2000, the poet was talking about skulls and crossbones and his angels had grown dark. “If only she could see,” the speaker muses, “…my new skull

& bones” (100). The sense of foreboding was extensive, an eerie precursor to the 9/11 attacks:

McVeigh’s been found guilty. My wife’s in California, visiting friends she once was young with who can always make her laugh. I’ve never been the kind who feels deathly in autumn. I don’t bring home the landscape. But more and more it just comes in, presses down, finds correlatives in me. The moon’s shining now through the big window. In the world I can’t help but live in, it seems the cold and the righteous are no less dangerous than the furious, the crazed. Everywhere, an error leading to an error. Everywhere the justified. (“So Far” 68)

The short lines are exacting, precise, the line breaks thoughtfully surprising, carrying momentary meanings as when “the world I can’t help” hovers before its completed predicate “but live in.” Then too there are those domestic excuses and rampant

252 anxieties. In “His Town,” the poet worries: “No safety in the universe. He’d stay put”

(98). Oklahoma City is still a fresh wound, McVeigh standing trial: “The accused chose to plead innocent / because he was guilty. We allowed such a thing; / it was one of our greatnesses, nutty, protective” (113). In addition to a darkening anxiety of place and security, Dunn’s preoccupations at this time forewarn us and himself of a mid-life crisis, a crisis tied to terrorism and marriage. There are poems about turning sixty (“my heart itself a city with a terrorist / holed up in the mayor’s office” 21), the over-reactive shock at a couple’s divorce (“Not them.”—“My friends were perfect, perfect.” 36), which turns to Adorno’s theories of surfaces to explain the “cold eye” as the new insight into the psychology of marriage.

How fascinating that this poet who drew so beautifully the lost angels of the household, the shimmering wings of our most human efforts, was awarded a Pulitzer for this depressing collection. But this is where, upon the poet’s turning sixty, Dunn begins to understand the nineties’ glorious failures:

It’s time to give up the search for the invisible. On the best of days there’s little more than the faintest intimations. The millennium my dear, is sure to disappoint us. (22)

While “the search for the invisible” has always been futile for Dunn, a search which never yielded more than “tattered / mute angels no one has called upon in years,” (Landscape

77), the abandoning of the search altogether feels as if Dunn’s swan song is being sung before its time. Like Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn,” it is Dunn’s own “Farewell to an idea.” While the giving up, the disappointments, are supposedly tempered by Dunn’s title poem, which claims different moods, various ways of seeing, for “Different Hours,” nevertheless this is the poem which begins with a “small plane” having “descended through / the it’s-all-over-now Sturm and Drang,” in which the speaker sees himself “a

253 vanisher / in a long process of vanishing” (69). The hearth is disappearing, another sign of the late-life crisis which will soon be exacerbated by the events of 9/11. The poet’s body and “the phantom / of what it once was” yield “smoke / rising from a stubborn fire,” not the home’s hearth’s fire, but its malfunction—the speaker turning instead to modern electricity. “Night light, be my guide,” Dunn writes, “I can feel my way just so far” (118). It is fascinating to me, too, that a forthcoming collection of essays will draw from this dour mood of Dunn’s, its title being “A Better Way to Be Alone,”16 a line pulled from the closing line of the book’s final poem:

You who are one of them, say that I loved my companions most of all. In all sincerity, say that they provided a better way to be alone. (121)

Dunn’s despondent mood reflects the bursting of the many effervescent bubbles of the American nineties. “At the Restaurant,” for example, addresses the difficulty of knowledge and the failure of distractions to sufficiently distract, taking as its epigraph

Fernando Pessoa’s “Life would be unbearable / if we made ourselves conscious of it.” The poem bears out the failure of our common concerns to deflect what Holden called “the world’s immediacy,” where the unhappy diner coerces himself complimenting the small, odd thing:

Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan’s black dress, Paul’s promotion and raise. Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world. Insufficient, the merely decent man. (25)

Here the “praise refuge” of “Walking the Marshland” becomes reduced to the social act of predictable, trivial praise with a falsely emboldened capital P—the unbearable small talk, the “chatter and gaiety” which accompanies “the unspoken.” Despite this dark mood,

Dunn’s poetic is measured and precise—embodying a “delightfully taut lyricism”

(Murray). The lines above feel beautifully repetitious in the typographical and speech-like

254 reappearance of “praise,” and the echoing “in” of “inexcusable” and “insufficient.”

Williams might have written this poem and meant it (as I believe Dunn would have in another moment), spacing it as such:

Praise the Caesar Salad. Praise Susan’s

black dress .

Frost might have turned it into a sonnet foretelling the end of the world. And

Stevens would have renamed the poem’s too-obvious things, salad becoming “green geraniums in the bronze bowl,” and Susan’s black dress the “final night of the mind.”

He would, of course, have kept “slaughter” and “merely decent.” By mood, too, Dunn’s

Different Hours feels like “The Auroras of Autumn,” come to chasten, to record, to tattoo—in addition to the tattoo of skull and bones, the speaker of “Empathy” is one who “understood you could feel so futureless / you’d want to get a mermaid / tattooed on your biceps” (52). Like Stevens, Dunn tries to make a home out of the darkness, but winds up cajoling himself into a sense of ‘privilege’ rather than ‘endurance’:

The commonplace and its contingencies, his half-filled cup, the monstrous domesticated by the six o’clock news— these are his endurances, in fact his privileges, if he has any sense. (23)

And while Dunn grows darker—infused with a “methodical, IV-dripping sense of demise” (Murray)—the shift in mood occurs culturally, across mediums. If the nineties were ‘awash with angels,’ then the first decade of the new millennium has been carved in skulls. In 2007, the fashion world reported “Last year was the year of the skull.” Skull-print scarves appeared everywhere, and:

It didn't stop there. Once reserved for Hell's Angels, rock stars, and pallid

255 teenagers, the skull became something you could buy encrusted in diamonds from Dior Fine Jewelry or printed on the soft cotton of a baby's onesie. (Skrypek)

It was during the so-called “year of the skull” that Dunn concluded there were “no safe havens-for long” in his essay “Art & Refuge,” which considers the notion of refuge in light of Kafka’s “Hunger Artist.” Through that caged lens, Dunn understands, mournfully, that “The driven artist, like anyone who might go all the way with some endeavor, pays a social cost.” Dunn’s own cost of intertwining life and art has resulted in the disturbing of the domestic sphere in ways that have been humorous, poignant, dangerous:

If we take refuge in our rooms for days on end, it's best that we live alone. If we live with others, we'd better emerge with something pretty good. Magnificent would be preferable. And even if we do, there's no guarantee it will offset, say, feelings of spousal neglect. The alternative is to live with a saint, about which there are many downsides, not the least of which is that in most saints lurks a revolutionary; it's just a matter of years before the upheavals begin. (24)

The isolation and tension in a marriage, the cycles of domesticity, then, for the male domestic poet, who does most of his real work at home, provides a poetic burden which, put to good use, creates a pressure amenable to good art. But riffing on the concept of refuge, the poet laments that some refuges “are just watering holes on the way to nowhere,” (25). Then, too, to counteract that nomadic impulse which he had suppressed for so many decades prior to 9/11, Dunn returns to the daydream of his mundane married life:

“The refuge of the habitual—the comfort of it, the stasis” (25). It is surprising that the relatively conservative Dunn, disclosing only what he chooses, should wind up, like Sylvia

Plath and Anne Sexton, turning compulsory domesticity into a public art form, his form of professional starvation. After 9/11 the heroic endeavors of marital ‘striving’ which he celebrates in the nineties lose their allure. He too has suffered a sense of urgency, a carpe diem experienced en masse, like all of those parents who conceived on 9/11, or like all of

256 us who have been given what Springsteen called that “one last chance to make it real, to trade in these wings on some wheels.”

The shuddering of Local Visitations, where the first and last sections of the book take on unusually veiled persona poems, is in trying to shield the raw personal confessions of the middle section, where Dunn leaves his wife and sings of his new love. Without those useful burdens, the poet’s trademark marital tension and anxious commitment to place evaporate as the poet struggles to define his new place in limbo.

Thus, Dunn leaves behind the male domestic model offered by Frost, Stevens, and

Williams, his masters of American sameness and regional attachment. Dunn’s poetic continues to crack and reform as the poet clings to various shapes—imitation poems, the villanelle—in The Insistence of Beauty. Read in view of Dunn’s full body of work, these collections reveal the literary debris left by September 11, 2001. But they also reveal their untold impact on contemporary poetry. Such an impact was arguably never felt by even America’s Modernist writers who lived through two World Wars, the Great

Depression, and the Cold War, for 9/11 ushered in an unprecedented terror in the very place where we live, and—for Dunn—in his literal birthplace.

After 2001 and its cataclysms, I worried over what would supplant Dunn’s betrayed muse—the domestic house and its frustrations and comforts. But slowly his ruptured life and poetic has settled into its new comforts and discomforts, and the poet who lived on for years like his idols, Frost, Stevens, and Williams, has allowed history to push him out into the world again. From his new home he has revised and regretted his desires. “What a man wants is to be rescued/ from what he’s not,” Dunn has written, “to test, then see what remains / of his inheritance” (What Goes On 193). But

Dunn’s rescue (from his familial life as an impostor, one assumes, by his new wife) does

257 not preclude the poet’s acknowledging what the domestic affords. Thus, in “Talk to

God” the poet advises:

Thank him for your little house on the periphery, its splendid view of the wildflowers in summer, and the nervous, forked prints of deer in that same field after a snowstorm. Thank him even for the monotony that drives us to make and destroy and dissect what would otherwise be merely the lush, unnamed world. (What Goes On 163)

While Dunn begins to recapture the tensions of the house, the ‘destruction and dissection’ of place which yields art, his poems seem to have hovered for some time, now, almost placeless, filled between the lines with regret. In Everything Else in the World, which appeared in 2006, he writes that “the desirable place is always another place, / my father said. The restlessness continues” (“My Ghost” 23). Elsewhere he writes:

experience always occurs too late to undo what’s been done. The hint of moon above an unperturbable sea,

and that young man, that poor me, staring ahead—everything is as it was. And of course has been changed. I got over it. I’ve never been the same. (18)

Hidden in the perspective of the dead father, or a younger self hurt by early heartbreak, the emotional center of Everything Else in the World feels encoded, like names changed in a diary to hide the truth from a jealous lover. The lovely paradoxical lines above, finely tuned, strike a measured balance between emotional nostalgia and charged rhythm: the easily uttered “everything is as it was,” the alliterative, assonant song of “and of course has been changed,” and the chiastic logic of the final line, which—once I parse the words from the music—makes clear an associative sense of two polar accomplishments. Sadly, like the hunger artist in his deprivation, Dunn’s poems seem

258 weighted under a double constraint of regret and deceit. His new life, embarked upon in

2001 with some exhilarating agitation, has now, ten years later, quieted somewhat, moving from “electricity,” which “may start things,” to “a steady, low-voltage hum / of affection” which, he insists, “must be arrived at.” How else, he asks, is one “to offset / the occasional slide / into neglect and ill temper?” (41-42). Again, the “neglect and ill temper” of his new marital tension guides Dunn’s poetic, but the specificity of his place in South Jersey is lost forever. The poems have grown botanical and vague, forgetting those scrub oaks and pitch pines which decorated Port Republic, that home where the poet once played the role of husband/father—amusing, disgracing, exasperating his wife and daughters as he did in “Under the Black Oaks”:

Because the mind will defend anything it has found the body doing, I tell my family I’m out here because the house is cold, because it’s Saturday, because I feel like it. The rock-hard acorns are falling and I’ve placed my chair where one has just fallen, the beginnings of a theory . . . The family points out there are places I could sit where nothing but the sun could hit me, but of course I know about them. (Local Time 96)

The defensive posture of the opening lines, the suggestive inappropriateness of the body’s actions, these are clues, of course, to Dunn’s general domestic state of mind—the lived life and the unlived life forever in conflict, his desire to be elsewhere, with others.

But there is something endearing here, too, in the image of a man in a house of women vying for a private place within the domestic landscape:

When the wind comes up the acorns fall like hailstones. I sit in my chair

259 listening to how they brush leaves on the way down, a natural jazz, thud and silence, then another thud. (96)

Dunn paints the ridiculous stubbornness of the suburban man who, despite the quasi- comic threat of falling acorns, stands his ground at all costs: “My family shouts “Come in, come in,” / but I’m out under the black oaks / and will not budge” (97).

But that suburban man under the black oaks, altered by 9/11 has finally budged from that mildly difficult place—only to move out and reinvent his domestic habitation.

One wonders how the terrorist event hitting as it did on American soil might have changed Frost, Stevens, or Williams. Would these poets have moved on too, in the aftermath of that local crisis? Would they have abandoned their hemmed-in lives which produced their two-fold poetics as lovers of the local, dreamers of elsewhere. Would they have left the wives they variously resented—Williams taking up with, say, Marcia Nardi, and leaving “Asphodel”’s greeny apology to Flossie buried in the unwritten earth of

Rutherford? Would Stevens have flown South to his beloved, imaginary Florida? As it is, those early American men, models for Dunn and generations of poets, stuck it out, used their oscillating contentment and dissatisfaction as a creative pressure to produce works alternately intimate and encoded.

What Dunn continues to offer us is an evolving portrait of the American husband-poet’s domestic world, where space is peopled by desires for a life both lived and dreamed, and the ways in which a mind can create poetic manipulations. In his latest collection, Here and Now, which appeared just before the tenth anniversary of

9/11—Dunn continues to grapple philosophically with the ramifications of that disaster and his own “personal cataclysms” which occurred around that time. But his prosody has reassembled itself, and his fidelity to the poem seems to have been restored. Still, the poet keeps looking back, remembering his earlier life of reliable discord and

260 comfort. In “Leaving the Empty Room" Dunn is still examining, a decade after his departure, that long-time marriage:

. . . Maybe I needed a certain romance of departure to kick in, as if I were waiting for magic instead of courage, or something else I didn’t have. No doubt you’re wondering if other people inhabited the empty room. Of course. What’s true emptiness without other people? (25-26)

Dunn has continued to explore that lingering emptiness. Now that the dust has settled, the poet searches for an understanding of his motivations for leaving home:

I thought twice many times. But when I left, I can’t say I made a decision. I just followed my body out the door, one quick step after another, even as the room started to fill with what I’d been sure wasn’t there. (26)

To understand what he has left behind, Dunn refines the terms of his own sense of emptiness. “As the room started to fill / with what I’d been sure wasn’t there” reincarnates the Snow Man’s Zen analysis. Was the abandoned life, the empty room, a life of nothingness, after all? Or was it a nothing which, in abandoning it, became real, became a greater and greater something in memory? Here Dunn’s skill for double endings lives on, carrying forward from the last century our love for ambiguity. Gone, however, is the bittersweet joy of the nineties where another kind of “Emptiness” could be imagined in Between Angels where yogis talked “of a divine / emptiness, / the body free of its base desires.” That emptiness the poet had located within excess and accomplishment, too, even boasting of having “shared an emptiness with someone / and learned / how generous” he could be (32).

261 By 2006, however, only “Emptiness” remained. The title reappears in Everything

Else in the World, where the poet remarks on his new wife’s surprise at his continued sense of dissatisfaction—“she’s been amazed / how much I seem to need my emptiness,

/amazed I won’t let it go” (28). Dunn’s new life—for Dunn’s first wife did “[see] her husband disappear / down the path they had never / given a name” (Circus 74)—has not quelled the restless anxiety his poems embody. Despite the fragmentation of his poetic in 2001—the bad love poems, the strike of terror, the disoriented clambering forms—Dunn has again arrived at a poetic of thwarted fulfillment written in lucid forms. At seventy-two, he is the living example of the American male domestic poet moving from the twentieth century to the twenty-first. As such, Dunn turns back to the poem, as he always has, to locate a room of his own, and one forever empty. “Our poems must read and sound,” Dunn once said, speaking more truly perhaps than he realized, as though we inhabited them.

262 Works Cited

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Seventies Author(s).” Contemporary Literature 21.2 (Spring 1980): 191-224.

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2000.

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1994. Rpt. of La Poetique de l’Espace. 1958.

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---. One Art: Letters Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, 1994.

Campion, Peter. “Ten Takes.” Rev. of The Insistence of Beauty, by Stephen Dunn. Poetry

185.2 (Nov. 2004): 131. deNiord, Chard. “What Goes On.” Rev. of What Goes On, by Stephen Dunn. Harvard

Review 37 (2009): 217.

Dobyns, Steven. “Giving In To The Passions.” Rev. of Between Angels, by Stephen Dunn.

The New York Times 28 Jan. 1990, late ed., Section 7: 26.

Dunn, Stephen. 5 Impersonations (chapbook). Browerville, Minnesota: Ox Head Press,

1971.

---. “After Desert Storm.” After the Storm: Poems on the Persian Gulf War. Ed. Jay Meek

and F.D. Reeve. Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve P, 1992. 27.

---. “Art & Refuge.” The American Poetry Review 35.5 (Sep./Oct. 2006): 24-25.

---. Between Angels. New York: Norton, 1989.

---. A Circus of Needs. 1978. Pittsburgh: Carnegie, 1987.

---. “Degrees of Fidelity.” After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. Saint Paul: Graywolf,

263 2001. 176-181.

---. Different Hours. New York: Norton, 2000.

---. Full of Lust and Good Usage. 1976. Pittsburgh: Carnegie, 1992.

---. Here and Now. New York: Norton, 2011.

---. The Insistence of Beauty. New York: Norton, 2004.

---. Interview. “Poet of Restraint and Extravagance: A Conversation with Stephen

Dunn.” Frostburg State University. Nightsun 20 (2 Mar. 2000).

---. Interview by Philip Dacey. The Cortland Review. March 2000. Web.

---. Interview by Elizabeth Farnsworth. PBS’s “Online Newshour.” 26 Apr. 2001.

---. Interview by Joel Whitney. Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics. October 2004. Web.

---. Landscape at the End of the Century. New York: Norton, 1991.

---. Local Time. New York: Quill, 1986.

---. Local Visitations. New York: Norton, 2003.

---. Looking for Holes in the Ceiling. Amherst: UMass P, 1974.

---. Loosestrife. New York: Norton, 1996.

---. “on “Mr. Flood’s Party” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.” Touchstones: American Poets

on a Favorite Poem. Eds. Robert Pack and Jay Parini. Hanover, NH: Middlebury CP,

1996. 52- 56.

---. New and Selected Poems 1974-1994. New York: Norton, 1994.

---. Not Dancing. Pittsburgh: Carnegie, 1984.

---. Riffs and Reciprocities. New York: Norton, 1998.

---. “Stephen Dunn.” Journal. The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of

Contemporary American Poets. Ed. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, and David Weiss.

New York: Norton, 1995. 22-30.

---. Walking Light. 1993. Rochester, NY: Boa, 2001.

264 ---. What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009. New York: Norton, 2009.

---. Work and Love. Pittsburgh: Carnegie, 1981.

Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. 1992. Saint Paul:

Graywolf, 2002.

Gilbert, Roger. “Awash with Angels: The Religious Turn in Nineties Poetry.” American

Poetry of the 1990s. Spec. Issue of Contemporary Literature 42.2 (Summer 2001): 238-69.

Hirsch, Edward. Poet’s Choice. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.

Holden, Jonathan. The Fate of American Poetry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991.

---. The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

Justice, Donald. New and Selected Poems. New York, Knopf: 1995.

Kriegel, Leonard. “Urban Reflections.” Rev. of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays, by

Stephen Dunn. The Sewanee Review 102. 2 (Spring 1994): xxxvi-xxxvii.

Kronen, Steve. “Earthly Quires.” Rev. of Between Angels, by Stephen Dunn. Kenyon

Review 13.3 (Summer, 1991): 161-8.

Lentricchia, Frank. “The Resentments of Robert Frost.” American Literature 62.2 (Jun.

1990): 175-200.

Murray, G.E. “The Collective Unconscious.” The Southern Review 37.2 (Spring 2001): 404-420.

Myers, Jack, and Roger Weingarten, eds. New American Poets of the 90s. Boston: Godine, 1991.

Muratori, Fred. Rev. of Between Angels, by Stephen Dunn. Library Journal 1 May 1989. 80.

Muratori, Fred. Rev. of Local Visitations, by Stephen Dunn. Library Journal 1 Dec. 2002.

134.

Rector, Liam. “Poetry Chronicle.” Rev. of Stephen Dunn’s Local Time. The Hudson Review

39:3 (Autumn 1986) 501-515.

Skrypek, Erin. “Anatomy of a Trend: Inspired by the Human Body, Designers Flesh Out

New Looks.” Boston Globe 21 Jun. 2001. E2.

265 Smith, Dave. “Dancing Through Life Among Others: Some Recent Poetry From

Younger American Poets.” American Poetry Review 8.3 (May/Jun. 1979): 29-30.

Smith, Dinitia. “A Woman of Power in the Ivory Tower” New York Times, Arts, 22 Nov.

1997.

Smith, Ron. “Sisyphus and Other Artifices.” Rev. of Local Visitations. Blackbird: An

Online Journal of Literature and the Arts 1.1 (Spring 2002).

Strauss, Robert. “Ode to Joi(sey).” New York Times, Books, 27 Apr. 2003.

Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Harvard UP: Cambridge MA,

1988.

Vendler, Helen. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA,

1980.

Williams, William Carlos. Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II 1939-1962.

1981. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 2001.

---. Paterson. 1946-51. New York: New Directions, 1995.

266 Notes

1See Frank Lentricchia’s “The Resentments of Robert Frost,” particularly 177-191. 2 For how Stevens’ sense of safety was impacted by real or imagined threats to home owners during the Great Depression, see Alan Filreis’ chapter “The Poet and the Depression, Part 3: A Dirty House in A Gutted World” (particulary 81-88) in his Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. 3 See Roger Gilbert’s essay titled after Wilbur’s poem, “Awash With Angels: The Religious Turn in 1990s Poetry” which appears in a special issues of Contemporary Literature, titled “American Poetry of the 1990s.” 42.2 (Summer 2001): 238-69. 4 See Steve Kronen’s review of Between Angels in The Kenyon Review, Volume 13, No. 3 (Summer 1991) 161-8 where he writes that collection’s first poem, “The Guardian Angel” reveals “our human vulnerability and our quiet everyday tenacity, perhaps courage, in the face of those vulnerabilities.” “Dunn’s angel,” he adds, “is, of course, you and me” (166). 5 Springsteen, Bruce, VH1 Storytellers, Web. 6 Bruce Springsteen: “Thunder Road.” Born to Run. Columbia Records, 1975. 7 One of the new pieces, circa 1994, to appear in New & Selected Poems 1974-1994: 18. 8 See the poet’s note on page 112 of Riffs and Reciprocities. 9 Dunn’s finished piece on this topic, entitled “Art & Refuge,” appeared in American Poetry Review, (September/October 2006): 25-26. 10 In an interview with Philip Dacey in The Cortland Review, Dunn’s advice to aspiring poets reads: “Poetry doesn't reveal its secrets to the occasional poet. Be as committed as, say, a violinist or a ballerina would be. No shortcuts.” 11 Dunn, who began teaching at Stockton State College in Pomona, New Jersey in 1974, continued teaching there until 2004, three years after he had moved in--part time--with his second wife in Maryland. The Poetry World. “Closing one chapter in his life looking forward to what’s next.” Web. 12 Originally published as “Sisyphus’s Affair” in February 2003 in Poetry, Dunn drops the mask and includes the poem in the slim section of broken marriage and new love poems at the center of the book. 13 See Robert Strauss’s article “Ode to Joi(sey),” on the plenitude of poets who called or still call New Jersey home, in The New York Times, Books Section, April 27, 2003. 14 Ibid. 15 Just how faithful Dunn was to keeping this story private is suspect; I myself had heard the tale with a handful of writers one evening in New Jersey in the nineties. It is safe to say, perhaps, that it did not appear in print until “Juarez.” 16 Edited by Laura McCullough, and including some promising titles.

267 EPILOGUE

As a genre with an obscured heritage deriving from the dissenting traditions of Modernist localism, American male domestic poetry has yet to be examined as substantially as correlative work by women poets in the United

States. A relatively new field, Helen Vendler announced its birth a mere three decades ago—“watching a genre evolve,” she said, “can have, for literary people, the interest that watching a new volcano has for geologists.”1 But American critics have made bad geologists. No one noticed in the years following the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, the dramatic eruption in the work and life of someone I consider to be one of our last living male domestic poets, a man who has, over the past four decades, made art out of his domestic life.

And if Stephen Dunn’s poetic has rebounded now that he has fashioned a new domestic frame for himself, his speaker still looks back with longing at the cherished insufficiency on which he built his first marriage and his poetic career.

A host of problems has contributed to our neglect of Dunn and of his genre.

Among them let us consider these: a persistent preference for cultural globalism dating back to Pound, stereotypes which continue to dictate the home as the woman’s domain, or the poem as a non-worldly domain. Then there is the derogatory use of the term “domestic poet” linked to such stereotypes, as well as a relentless devaluation of domesticity itself, despite claims to the contrary, as a thing of poetic value.

268 We are not alone in our domestic hang-ups. The belief that domesticity conflicts with “the poetic life or spirit,” the Irish critic Brendan Glacken has complained, “has done untold harm over the years to the development of genuine literature in [Ireland],” despite the fact that poets “have always produced their best work when in deeply supportive if boring relationships, i.e., marriage.” Such a continued impasse necessarily impacts upon the poet’s personal life at home, of course, but it also impacts his poetic:

we are still encouraged to believe that the poet (the genuine article) is a free spirit who cannot be tied down to daily routines, safe jobs and the minutiae of domestic life. When the poor fellow is asked to hang out the washing, or vacuum-clean the carpets, his poetic soul rebels, he leaves the wife and kids, turns to drink, and out of this (in time) comes a Great Poem. Or so the theory goes.2

The Irish male poet, then, must be an ethereal being, or better yet, an ethereal being driven to despair when confronted with the horrors of the mundane. One

American poet claims her Scottish poet-husband, on the other hand, does not run from, but revels in the discrepancy between elevated poetry and lowly life: “The contractual arrangement the male poet makes with his soul also obliges him to be utterly impractical - and proud of it to boot. Who was to do the shopping? The cleaning? The tax returns?,” asks Eva Salzman.3 In short, domestic minutiae is not conducive to poetry. Combine that arguable fact with American gender roles involving domesticity and literature in the twentieth century and you have a non-formulating formula to please even Frost: Domestic minutiae is not manly.

Domestic minutiae is not poetic. Ergo: poetry is not manly.

While Frost fought to legitimize the male poet through a ‘manly’ verse based in everyday speech—he himself an American icon celebrated in homes

269 across the country,4 Stevens searched for a place to call home, and Williams, during his rounds of house calls especially, made of domestic minutiae, domestic grandeur (one little boy said of the doctor’s stethoscope, “I bet you can hear all the secrets”),5—for all that work, so many new young male poets are still afraid to look around, to really live somewhere. Forgetting Williams’ legacy, they continue to get caught up in the world of ideas. The American male poet of the twenty-first century often forgets the significance of the domestic, and feeling obliged towards great poetic philosophies, has never gleaned the skills necessary to reveal the intrinsic poetry of the everyday.

Instigators of language poetry like John Ashbery, and his followers, have proved an especially divergent force, popularizing a disconnected sense of language which has replaced this generation’s sense of self and locality. While he works from a homoerotic tradition, which sees the female as at best problematic,

Ashbery’s work has grown increasingly disembodied, taking no accountability for the origins of its own speech, which hasn’t helped much to expand the tradition of American male lyric domesticity. Where Shall I Wander, the title itself reflecting an arbitrariness of place, includes poems that are like cultural commercials recounting the cognitive blips of an overloaded mind. When

Ashbery does address locality, it is from a fractured American consciousness too confused to recognize its environment or remember its past:

We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine. We drove downtown to see our neighbors. None of them were home. We nestled in yards the municipality had created, reminisced about other, different places— but were they? Hadn’t we known it all before? (1)

270 The royal “we” has become neurotic in its disconnected leaps. I fear for what will become of the American male domestic poet if an Ashberyian tonal collage continues to supplant the voice of the unified, if conflicted, domestic man. Where will we get our news of the inside of homes, from our scattered locales, when so many of our male poems are now stitched from the drifting refuse of advertisements and their implied meaninglessness? Certainly someone like Stephen Dunn was formed out of the early intimations of home and hearth— with its desperate desire for a connection to place—from his Modernist fathers from whom he learned the power of both disclosure and resistance. Our male twenty-first century poets would do well to hone their sense of personal voice, to return a sense of self to the difficult situation in and out of the home, for it is the sense of difficulties overcome, of understanding and coming to terms with the female, which can make most clear humanity’s deeper joy. While Dunn’s

Different Hours has grown dark, still he has toiled to “live without hope / as well as I could, almost happily, / in the despoiled and radiant now.”6

Almost-happiness in the face of often-hopelessness: that has been the thorny American task of our twentieth century male domestic poet, a heritage handed down from Whitman, even from Emerson and Whittier, and later to be grappled with by our domestic Modernists as they lived through two World

Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War, a heritage which was at last shaken by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It has been, to say the least, an exhausting task. And with the inequalities of civil rights involving marriage and domestic partnership, who can blame the twenty-first century poet who tells us ““You’re

271 not here”—who insists that marriage “can’t be a love story / or a hate story / because it’s not a / story.”7

Certainly there is more work to do, to correct our oversights, to expand our understanding of the domestic beyond the heterosexual confinements I have served here. How fascinating it will be to put an epic like James Merrill’s The

Changing Light at Sandover in such a context of complicated domesticity, to consider the history of “Snow-bound”’s American hearth, where Whittier conjures the ghost of Agrippa’s occult philosophy—against the ways Merrill uses that occult tradition to trouble the home with its dark powers, capable of summoning the dead, to what end—comfort or terror? Additionally, Merrill helps to shift the paradigms of domestic gender expectations, there is no woman who is angel of this house.

Or are certain domestic attitudes and activities culturally bound to gender, regardless of the actual gender of the home’s inhabitants? Critics have claimed so, have claimed that Gertrude Stein embodied the patriarchal husband, belittling Alice, by identifying her as a baby, as she does in “The House Was Just

Twinkling in the Moon Light,” where inside the domestic space Stein finds her

“baby bright”:

Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks and he always thinks when he knows and he always knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs, blessed baby8

Stein’s role playing, then, is a way of playing house, of fulfilling those stereotypical roles of protector and protected. In fact, Dunn himself has revealed in his latest book, which appeared in May 2011, a month before his 72nd birthday,

272 the sense of pretending involved in the man’s role in the household, in his poem,

“Imposter”:

you playing husband, playing father, you playing the man who starts to believe

the words on his business card putting on your suit in the morning the way knights once put on their armor,

all day carrying a heaviness that at first gets you down, yet soon begins to feel normal, a chosen

weight, your very own masquerade. It sounds bad, but you’ve tried hard to successfully impersonate that man.

You’ve wanted act to become habit, love replicated to be a definition of love, though in fact you’ve been an impostor

of an impostor . . . (Here and Now 27)

From the great poet of domestic tension comes at last the forthright revelations of the falsehood of compulsory domestic life. Or, is “Impostor” merely one more layer of the continued justification of, and repressed guilt over, leaving his first wife? If so, the terrorist events of 2001 which led to Dunn’s departure from his marriage and family home, have shaken the male domestic poet even further than I have explored here.

Certainly female voices like that of Sharon Olds have cemented domesticity’s capability of offering up a worthy and often astonishing poetic world. Some new male voices are trying to address the changing domestic space, with its many modern incarnations. Matthew Lippman’s “Marriage Pants”9

273 offers food for thought. “I don’t know when the shitstorm of failed marriage took off,” he writes. Issuing from all of the failed marriages around him—that institution of which he swore, like Plath, he’d never be a part—one question survives: “Who the hell am I / and what the hell have I done?” The poem’s ending, again like Plath, makes of the domestic situation an oppressive cage, those restrictive “marriage pants” donned at last:

Some mornings I get up and can’t tie my shoes.

I’m forty-four years old and can’t toast the seedless rye.

My kid cries because her hands are wet;

my wife undresses in front of open windows.

What am I supposed to do?

I wake up.

I say good morning.

I put on my pants.

But the tone here, which is both comic and incredulous, doesn’t seem quite right.

What took Dunn decades to master, something much talked about in his work, is a sense of the problematic “genuine.” The fact that there is an ‘earnestness’ to his work most likely stems from the fact that he is—at least in his tone—quite earnest in the way he convolutes life and art, and this makes him eminently readable. As Vendler says in The Music of What Happens, “many poets who deal with the local…fall into a gritty naturalism. Dunn, for all his affirmation of plain speech and plain encounters . . . has a delicacy of touch in treating his plain material” (441). But there’s no delicacy of touch in “Marriage Pants,” which feels

274 a bit too punk to come from a real locale, and which thus fails to achieve

Williams’ dictum that “Poetry should be local, and not merely copy a “thing which is the result of special local conditions or thought and circumstance”

(Selected Essays 29). In the long run, “Marriage Pants” remains implausible. One feels the poet floundering for what a forty-four year old man can’t achieve domestically. The inability to “toast the seedless rye” should not have made the cut in this poem. Male domesticity should go deeper than that.

What will become of the American male domestic poet if he needs such training to overcome the cultural baggage of male domesticity, to push past the seedless rye, especially now that the few and greatest participants of the genre are entering their twilight years? If we begin to understand, as we come up on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the great importance of the endangered male domestic lyric, we might embrace this mottled genre for what it is—a reflection of the repressed and fulfilled desires of the American twentieth century hearth in which male poets operated under or against poetic and domestic reductions.

Begun in naiveté, wrought by tragedy, these great poetic fireplaces offer us an understanding of the problems created by a sense of domestic insufficiency which Dunn has so lovingly explored. The fact that such insufficiency has been there all along, buried as it may be, makes for a rich and fascinating untangling of Early American and Modernist texts—a few giant figures of which, by way of considering Dunn’s ‘covering cherubs,’ as Bloom would have it, I have taken on in this project.

275 Still, at the end of the day, when it is time to light the fire, or turn up the thermostat in my home in Maine, I find myself cheering not for the shortcomings, but for those little domestic victories—Stevens’ final sense of belonging in Connecticut, long in the making, in which the restless fantasy of the

Florida Keys gets relegated out to the furthest recesses of the imagination, past the palm at the end of the mind. Someone coming home to lay a soup spoon on a

Robert Frost trivet. Williams, oh Williams, how he fought the most doggedly of all for a local vision, trading in even the word “milieu” for “local.” Of all these resolutely American poets, I think it would be Williams looking with pride at the many twenty-first century community movements that are springing up, ones like the “Eat Local” initiative which has returned consumer emphasis to regional farms. A “Write Local” initiative, then, in honor of these domestic men who fought to carve out their place. After all, as Vendler has said, ““Out of the world, a small piece is lived in.”10 Wendell Berry can organize the Kentucky faction. But, you know boys, he’s going to need a successor.

Wendy Cannella July 24, 2011

276 Notes

1 The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Harvard UP: Cambridge MA, 1988. pp. 444. 2 See Brendan Glacken’s “A poet averse to domesticity” appeared in The Irish Times on July 5, 2001 in the City Edition; News Features; Times Square; pp. 16. 3 See Eva Salzman’s article, “Two poets, one roof? Forget it,” appeared in The Times on January 28, 1998 in the “Features” section. 4 Especially in his own region of New England. The Frost materials in the Milne Special Collections & Archives at the University of New Hampshire include a cooking trivet printed with Frost’s image alongside his poem, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” A painting with a title borrowed from the same poem graced the living room of a Boston College student’s family home in New Hampshire. 5 See Robert Coles, House Calls with William Carlos Williams MD. Brooklyn, Powerhouse, 2008. pp. 41. 6 Different Hours. New York: Norton, 2000. pp. 120. 7 Joel Brouwer, “Lines on Marriage,” Poetry, October 2010. 8 From Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (St. Martin's Press, 1999). 9 Matthew Lippman, “Marriage Pants,” American Poetry Review, Vol. 39, No. 2. 10 Helen Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us, pp. 104.

277